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Theology Library

SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY
AT CLAREMONT
California

prom fhe library of
Floyd H. Ross

FLOYD H. ROSS
990 SOUTH Los ROBLES AVE.
PASADENA 5, CALIFORNIA

Heretics, Saints, and Martyrs

LONDON : HUMPHREY MILFORD

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

HERETICS, SAINTS
pe AND MARTYRS

Shee BY

FREDERIC PALMER
yy

CAMBRIDGE
HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1925

COPYRIGHT, 1925

BY HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

PRINTED AT THE HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS, U,S, A.

Preface

URING the last generation a revolution has
taken place in the teaching of law. Instead of
laying down the principles of the law and giving
some illustrations, the professors to-day cite a large
number of cases and require their students to gather
the law from them. This case-system, as it is called,
after being introduced tentatively in one law school
and being strongly opposed by others, has now be-
come almost universal.

A similar change may be noted in the teaching of
church history. Formerly theology was treated, first,
exegetically and dogmatically, and then reference
was made to men whose opinions confirmed or op-
posed the conclusions reached. The development of
theologic thought was rarely traced, and a man’s
place in a system was more emphasized than the
man himself. Recently we have come to study with
more interest each man’s personal history, the devel-
opment of his thought, its relations to the condi-
tions of his time and to the course of thought of the
world. From the contributions of this man and that
we may, if we are patient, construct an orderly
course of theologic thought.

Something of this case-study may perhaps be
found in the following pages. The essays aim to

THEOLOGY LIBRARY
D622 SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY
AT CLAREMONT
CALIFORNIA

vi PREFACE

show one and another line of thought as they were
forged in the mind and soul of this thinker and that.
They exhibit here no system; but they aim to point
out, beneath the little systems which have their day
and cease to be, the bond of unity among all their
diversities, the bond of a deep soul-breathing con-
sciousness of close fellowship with God. What may
be called the humanization of church history results
in the revelation in it of this unifying divine element.

The majority of these papers appear here for the
first time. “The Anabaptists” was translated into
French, and was issued in the “Revue de Métaphy-
sique et de Morale”’ in July, 1918. It has never been
printed in English. “Angelus Silesius” and “Isaac
Watts” were published in “The Harvard Theolog-
ical Review” in April, 1918, and October, Ig1g, re-
spectively. The last essay, on the different concep-
tions of Jesus in the New Testament, appeared in
“The American Journal of Theology” in July, 1919.
The others have never been published.

Contents

I. THE ANABAPTISTS AND THEIR RELATION TO CIVIL
AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY 9-02 )i)ou wt: ae wg

II. Joacuim or FLoris, anD THE EVERLASTING
Cio SA ene re AEA g RAPT ras its fed ee ayy 6°.

III. Ance.us SiILesius, anD DER CHERUBINISCHER
WVANDERSMANND Soe) ke a egg

IV. Isaac Watts, THE HyMN-wRITER OF PURITAN-
BO op ied se we salted aed See eee aes pee eet

V. PerpeTUA AND Feticiras, MARTYRS AND SAINTS 178
Vip VEANIVANDRUALISMint sel p ia Rope iid ie ova ee 202

VII. Tue Synoptic, JOHANNINE, AND PAvuLINE Con-
CEPEIONS <OF. JESUS: je 4c ost are eo ee

Heretics, Saints, and Martyrs

I

THE ANABAPTISTS AND THEIR RELATION
TO CIVIL AND RELIGIOUS LIBERTY

‘Gs of the valuable accomplishments of manu-
facturing in recent times has been the discovery
of the worth of by-products — substances or results
not primarily aimed at, but necessarily appearing in
the process of manufacture. The original object of
burning coal, for example, was to produce heat. But
with combustion there appeared coke, coal-tar, ani-
line dyes, creosote, paraffin, and other substances.
By-products such as these are often found more
valuable than the parent product. So in history the
apparently subordinate results of a movement often
turn out to be those which are the most significant
for the world’s future. The stone which the builders
rejected became the headstone of the corner.
Perhaps one may find an instance of this in the re-
lation of the Anabaptists to the Protestant Refor-
mation; although in this case one might hesitate to
assert that the by-product outweighed in value
the movement in which it originated. Yet Troeltsch,
the church-historian, declared that_the elements of _
Protestantism which constitute its chief value came
into the modern world not through the main chan-

4 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

nels of the Reformation but through the sects arising
from it which he regarded as heretical.! The chief of
these was that of the Anabaptists.

Many persons, and especially many ecclesiastical
institutions, are interested in claiming an ancestry —
going back — they would be glad to believe — to
Adam. The Anabaptists are more modest arid more
modern in their claims. Like all the other forms of
Christianity, they profess to be founded on the
model revealed in the New Testament. But their
connection with the apostolic age is regarded not so
much as a continuous chain, such as the Roman
Church boasts, but rather as a revival of conditions
intended, indeed, to be permanent, but which were
realized only here and there throughout the centu-
ries. During the third and fourth centuries there
were persons who declared baptism invalid when
performed by a heretic; and, therefore, since “here-
tic,” when used by one party, meant those of the
opposite party, the baptism of the Catholic Church
came to be regarded as invalid by those whom it
held as unorthodox. But if a child’s baptism was in-
valid, he was unbaptized. Then he must be brought
to baptism — his first genuine baptism, said those
who were concerned in it. No, said their opponents,
a re-baptism, a second, an anabaptism. Finally the
quarrel became noisy enough to be noticed. In 413

1 Ernest Troeltsch, Protestantism and Progress, tr. by W. Mont-
gomery, p. 122.

THE ANABAPTISTS 5

the emperors Honorius and Theodosius proclaimed
a law forbidding re-baptism on pain of death. Ap-
parently, however, this was not rigid enough; for in
428 another decree was issued prescribing punish-_
ment for all who held the baptism of the Catholic
State Church to be invalid. By
Throughout the Middle Ages here and there the
validity of infant baptism was questioned. It was
rejected by the Albigenses and the Waldenses,
though there seems to be no historic connection be-
tween their views in this respect and those of the
Anabaptists of the sixteenth century. It was then
for the first time that Anabaptism could claim a
stable foundation. For the Renaissance of the fif-
teenth century was the assertion by the individual
of his rights. Throughout antiquity and the Middle
Ages it was the corporate relations of man that were
chiefly regarded. It was the State, the tribe, the
Church, the family, that was of importance; the in-
dividual had few rights and scant consideration.
Individuals hereand there had indeed asserted them-
selves, and made the institutions they originally
served, serve them, or, in Scriptural phrase, had
“taken captivity captive.” But with the majority of
men the individual was lost in the institution. In the
fifteenth century, however, the generic individual

heard the voice of God calling him, and he too, like

Abraham and Moses, rose up and answered, “Here
am I.”

6 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

This new consciousness brought man in the
southern lands face to face with himself, and set
him to asking, “Why should not I be unrestrainedly
happy?” In the northern lands it brought him face
to face with God, and set him to asking, “Lord, what
wilt Thou have me to do?” In the southern lands
it blossomed in art and learning, in licence and lux-
ury; in the northern lands its chief expression was
in religion. The spirit of the Protestant Reformation
swept aside all intermediaries between n the soul soul and
God. It was “God and I,” and nothing between.
This sufficiency of the individual to himself in his
relation to God was at least what seemed to many
the logical outcome of the doctrine of justification
by faith; even though Luther himself and Calvin
also maintained the alliance of Church and State.

While Luther and his party formed what might
be called the Right Wing of the Reformation, there
were others who established a Left Wing. Individu-
alism, when growing and sturdy, always demands
change in social conditions. In Germany in the fif-
teenth century fundamental changes in the social
condition were needed. The outbreaks of the peas-
ants under the banner of the Bundschuh, which be-
gan in 1492 and continued sporadically for nearly
a quarter of a century, had been ruthlessly sup-
pressed. But though the flames had been smothered,
the embers still smouldered. In 1521 Thomas Miin-
zer, pastor of the church in Zwickau, and Nikolas

THE ANABAPTISTS 7

Storch, a leader of the weavers in the same place,
began to carry to what seemed their logical conclu-
sion the principles of the Reformation. If every in-
dividual might directly approach God and hear His
voice, then every one who trained himself thus to
hear might be a prophet. Miinzer and Storch pro-
claimed themselves prophets, needing the authori-
zation of neither priest nor Bible, for they were
themselves inspired. They organized a society, with
twelve apostles and seventy-two disciples at its
head; and when they came into conflict with the
local authorities, as was almost immediately, of
course, the case, they scattered and went throughout
the country preaching. It was a class-movement,
interwoven with the economic and social conditions
of the time. For the reforms the need of which they
preached were not in religion only. The ecclesiastical
and the feudal systems were so closely joined and the
oppression ion of both was so ‘so galling, that where rebel-
lion broke out it inevitably became both religious
and politic cal. Moreover, Bible-reading i in Luther’s
translation was almost the only reading of the un-
educated, and their lack of knowledge of history,
with a few fragmentary exceptions, made for them
no break between the biblical story and their own
times. They felt themselves in the conditions of
Moses and Joshua, and Jehovah spoke to them as
truly and with the same message as to the heroes of
the Old Testament.

8 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

The Zwickau prophets took up the grievances of
the peasants, and proclaimed a crusade of the sword
against all who opposed their gospel. Social revolt
and religious fanaticism combined in issuing the fol-
lowing proclamation:

Arise, fight the battle of the Lord! On! on! on! Now
is the time. The wicked tremble when they hear of you.
Be pitiless! Heed not the groans of the impious! On! on!
on! while the fire is burning; on while the hot sword is
yet reeking with the blood of the slaughter! Give the
fire no time to go out, the sword no time to cool! Kill
all the proud ones. While one of them lives, you will not
be free from the fear of man. While they reign over you,
it is no use to talk of God. Amen. Given at Miihlhausen,
1525. Thomas Miinzer, servant of God against the
wicked.!

A few extracts from the diary of a citizen of Roth-
enburg may give a glimpse of the events which took
place there during the Peasants’ War in that grim
year 1525:

Mar. 24. — This evening between five and six, the
head of the image of Christ is struck off, the arms broken,
and the pieces knocked about the churchyard.

Mar. 26.— Sunday — The priest driven from the
altar and his mass-book thrown down. The peasants
deploy themselves before the Galgen-Thor.

Mar. 28. — 700 peasants assemble and force other
peasants to join them.

1 Frederic Seebohm, The Era of the Protestant Revolution, p. 150.

THE ANABAPTISTS 9

Mar. 31.— The peasants have increased to 2,000.
Lorenz Knobloch, having promised to be a captain, has
gone out to them. Messengers from the Imperial Council
came to make peace, but without result.

Apr. 8.— Good Friday — The service done away.
No one sang or read. But Dr. Drechsel preached against
emperor, king, princes, and lords spiritual and temporal,
for hindering the word of God.

Apr. 10. — Easter Day — Hans Rothfuchs called the
sacrament idolatry. No service.

Apr. 14. — Some women run up and down the streets
with forks, pikes, and sticks, making an uproar and de-
claring that they will plunder all priests’ houses.

Apr. 28. — Corn given out, but only some take it.
Knobloch torn to pieces by the peasants, and they
pelted one another with the pieces. The peasants have
been heard to say that they would soon see what the
Rothenburgers were going to do.

May 1.— In the night they burned the cloister of E.,
plundered another, and burned the castle of C.

May 15.— Florian Geyer in the parish church pro-
poses articles of alliance among the peasants for 101
years. Demanded that the committee and people should
by oath and vow league themselves with the peasants.
Which was done, though against the grain to some.
Thus to-day Rothenburg has gone over from the Em-
pire to the peasants. A gallows was erected in the mar-
ket-place in token of this brotherhood and as a terror to
evil-doers. About five o’clock tents, wagons, powder are
got ready and taken to the camp of the peasants, with
intent to storm the castle of Wirtzburg. 300 peasants
who went up on May g tostorm the castle of Wiirtzburg

10 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

were all killed, part by stones, part shot, part slain —
taken like birds!

May 27. — 4,000 peasants slain in the valley of the
Tauber by the allied powers.

May 29.— 8,000 more peasants slain by the allies.
Three messengers are sent from Rothenburg to Mark-
graf Casimir, carrying a red cross, and fervently beg-
ging for mercy. No surrender would be accepted but on
“mercy or no mercy.” All citizens, clergy and laity, to
pay seven florins for Blood and Fire Money, or to be
banished thirty miles out of the city. The city to pro-
vide some tons of powder.

June 29. — Markgraf Casimir came to Rothenburg
with 800 horse, 1000 foot, 200 wagons well equipped
with the best artillery, which are placed in the market-
place.

June 30. — All citizens called by herald and ordered
to assemble in the market-place, and form a circle under
guard of soldiers with spears. It was announced that the
Rothenburgers had revolted from the Empire and joined
the peasants, and had forfeited life, honor, and goods.
The Markgraf and many nobles were present. Twelve
citizens were called out by name, and beheaded on the
spot. Their bodies were left all day in the market-place.
Several had fled who otherwise would have been be-
headed. .

July 1.— Eight more beheaded.!

The Peasants’ War culminated in 1525, in the
battle of Frankenhausen; after which 5000 peasants

1 Frederic Seebohm, The Era of the Protestant Revolution, pp. 146 ff.

THE ANABAPTISTS II

lay dead on the field, and Thomas Miinzer was
captured and beheaded.

This ended the revolution. Luther, writing on
June 21, 1525, says:

It is a certain fact that in Franconia 11,000 peasants
have been slain. Markgraf Casimir is cruelly severe upon
his peasants, who have twice broken faith with him. In
the Duchy of Wiirtemburg 6,000 have been killed;
in different places in Swabia, 10,000. It is said that in
Alsace the Duke of Lorraine has slain 20,000. Thus
everywhere the wretched peasants are cut down.

During the Peasants’ War it is estimated that_
100,000 persons perished, | or twenty times as many

as were put to death in Paris in the Reign of Terror
in 1793.

Luther was alarmed at the fire which he had kin-
dled, and in spite of his tone of commiseration, he
urged the princes to repress the revolt unsparingly.
Neither Luther nor Zwingli at first advocated a
State Church. But finally Luther said, “There is no
way out except | ‘through t the arm of the government.”
That arm, which was necessary to the maintenance
of the movement he had started, must be used to
put down the revolt which threatened to compro-
mise his cause. Reform, he decided, must come
through the State; revolt against the civil power
must never be countenanced. It was a bitter disap-
pointment to the peasants that Luther, himself a
peasant, should have sided, not with them but with

12 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

their oppressors, and have driven them on in their
work of destruction. His course had another and more
far-reaching result. It settled, for the religion which
he represented, the policy of union with the State,
and left to the despised and persecuted sects which

arose in connection with the Reformation the op-

portunity and the glory of establishing that separa-
tion between Church and State, with consequent
liberty of conscience within the limits of loyalty,
which are the foundation of that freedom in religion
so precious to-day.

There was a section of the Left Wing, however,
nearer the centre. It differed from the Lutheran po-
sition in holding that a State Church was contrary
to Scriptural principles. Scripture declared the
Church to consist of the elect. But to be of the elect |
required faith, and faith required an intelligent un-
derstanding of the gospel and a deliberate loyalty to
it. These were possible only to persons of mature
years; therefore the baptism of children was con-
trary to Scripture, or at least had no warrant in
Scripture. This opposition to a State Church was
characteristic of all who rejected infant baptism, ex-
cept the Miinsterites, the Batenburgers, and the
Davidians. The Left Centre believed that Luther
had known how to pull down a house but not how
to build a new one. It was mending a pot and making
the hole larger. The Reformation was not thorough,
but itself needed reform. R

THE ANABAPTISTS 13

On the other hand, this wing differed from the
extreme Left in opposing the resort to force. It was
at Ziirich in 1522 that this party which we have
called the Left Centre came into being. The “‘Breth-
ren,” or the “Spirituals,” as they were called, would
have nothing to do with carnal weapons. Konrad
Grebel, their leader, wrote in 1524 to Miinzer:

The gospel and its followers shall not be guarded
by the sword, neither shall they so guard themselves,
as — by what we hear from the Brethren — ye assume
and pretend to be right. Truly believing Christians are
sheep in the midst of wolves, sheep ready for the slaugh-
ter. They must be baptized in fear and in need, in tribu-
lation and death, that they may be tried to the last, and
enter the fatherland of eternal peace not with carnal
but with spiritual weapons.

Their enemies bear testimony to their uprightness
_of life. Johannes Hessler, the contemporary Zwin-
glian chronicler of St. Gall, writes: “Their walk and ~
conversation shone; it was quite pious, holy, and un-
blamable. They die gladly and valiantly for the
name of Christ, although they are tainted with
some error.” ! Heinrich Bullinger says: “They led
their lives under a semblance of a very spiritual con-
duct. They reproved earnestly pride, profanity, the
lewd conversation and debauchery of the world,
drinking, and gluttony.” * Joachim Vadian says:

1 Sabbata, Egli und Schock, pp. 147, 284.
2 Der Wiedertauffer Ursprung, xv, 10.

14 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

“None were at that time more inclined toward Ana-
baptism and entangled with it than those who were
of a pious and upright disposition.” *

For some months there was no open break be-
tween the Brethren and the official party of the

Reformation in Ziirich, led by Zwingli. But the differ-

ences grew and the bitternesses which ecclesiastical
and political differences bring. The Brethren insisted
on the abolition of tithes and other church dues.
The City Council passed a resolution denouncing
this attack on the sources of church revenue. The
Brethren pressed their doctrine that only the regen-

erate could be members of the church, and that in- |

fants therefore could not properly be baptized. As
the numbers of the Brethren increased, the rejection
of infant baptism came to be more and more the

dividing line between the two parties. The refusal

of parents to allow their children to be christened

was met by an edict making infant baptism com-_

pulsory, and a little later by another edict banishing
those who refused. This crystallized the situation.
Georg Blaurock, who had been a priest, called upon
Grebel to proclaim adult baptism as a duty for all
Brethren and, in furtherance of the plan, to baptize
him. This Grebel did, and Blaurock then adminis-
tered baptism to all present. All of the regenerate
might and should be baptized and all such were en-
titled to baptize others. This, which took place on

1 Deutsche historische Schriften, 1i, 408.

——

nether

Ee eee

THE ANABAPTISTS 15

January 21, 1526, marks the definite beginning of the
Anabaptist movement; for adult baptism was not
the characteristic feature of Miinzer’s movement,
though the two had common roots, and the later
Anabaptists, who descended from the Ziirich school,
repudiated connection with him.

After the defeat of Miinzer’s party at Franken-
hausen in 1526, the working classes saw the impos-
sibility of reform through insurrection, and turned
eagerly to the Anabaptists with their programme of
non-revolutionary reform. Even this programme was
feared by the authorities, and the Anabaptists were
pursued with banishment, fines, imprisonment, tor-
ture, and in 1528 by a decree of the Empire con-
demning them to death. Yet in spite of this, martyr-
dom, as so often, proved a good advertisement, and
in these years the Anabaptist_movement far ex-_
ceeded the Lutheran and Zwinglian movements in_
intensity and strength. But its new adherents car-
ried over into it the economic and social aims which
had been overthrown at Frankenhausen, and it
came to have more and more the political and revo-
lutionary tone which had characterized the party
of the Zwickau prophets.

Together with this the extreme individualism,
which was the basis of Anabaptism, began to show.
more openly and widely its logical fruits in the defi- _
ance of law and morals. Much of our knowledge of
the Anabaptists of these years comes from hostile

16 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

sources, and allowance must therefore be made in
receiving the evidence. These opposing critics would
undoubtedly magnify excesses and defects. But with
all due allowance for bias in the chroniclers, there is
sufficient trustworthy evidence of the extremes to
which many of the Anabaptists went. Bullinger de-
clares that a sect among them, called “The Holy
and Sinless Baptists,” maintained that the elect
cannot sin. Whatever the baptized believer might
do therefore, if it involved what otherwise would be
sin, in him it would be no sin, since it concerned his
body only and did not proceed from or touch his
soul. They consequently omitted from the Lord’s
Prayer the words “Forgive us our trespasses.” An-
other sect, “The Silent Brothers,” did not believe
in preaching, but held, like the Quakers of a century
later, that formal preaching should be abolished,
since the Apostle Paul had said, “There is a time to
be silent.” Among the “Ecstatic Brothers” visions,
dreams, revelations, were common and were re-
garded as having authority. These naturally passed
into religious epidemics. Women would rush into the
public meetings without their clothes, and only after
some time become conscious that they were naked.
Thomas Schugger declared that it was the will of the
Lord, revealed to him, a prophet, that he should
bind his brother Leonhardt, which was done. Leon-
hardt, who seems to have had a prophetic spirit of
his own, submissive yet more advanced, then pro-

THE ANABAPTISTS 17

claimed that it was the will of the Lord that his
head should be cut off by Thomas. After meditating
over night, Thomas proceeded to give this proof of
fraternal affection and to cut off his brother’s head;
for which he was himself beheaded a week later.
In Appenzell the command of Christ to his disciples
to become as little children was joyously and liter-
ally carried out. Many persons, male and female,
would act like young children — throwing apples at
each other, having their faces washed, sitting naked
on the ground, jumping up and down, clapping their
hands. Others fastened on a different text of Scrip-
ture — “The letter killeth ” — and therefore threw
their Bibles into the fire. Such excesses have ap-

peared in all times, wherever unbridled religious en- _

thusiasm has based itself on a conviction of the final
authority of the Scripture and a literal interpreta-_
tion of it.

On the other hand, there is evidence of the peace-
able and upright, if narrow, life of the members of
these communities. A member on joining vowed to
live according to the will of Christ, to forsake the
ways of the world, to hold his property as a trust for
all his fellow members, who were to be regarded as
his brothers and sisters, and to give to the poor all
that was not necessary for his own living. Kessler, a
hostile critic, who recorded his impressions of those
at St.Gall, says:

18 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

Because they are themselves unlearned, they despise
all learning, proclaiming that revelation and the inner
light come only to the simple and ignorant. Their walk
and conversation are throughout pious, holy, and blame-
less. They carry no weapon, neither sword nor dagger,
save it be a broken bread-knife, declaring that the sheep
durst not wear the wolf’s clothing. They swear not; nay,
not even take the civic oath to any authority; and should
one of them transgress in this, he will be banished by
them, for there is a daily purging of members among
them. In speech and disputation they are grim and bit-
ter, and are withal so stubborn that they are willing to
die for that which they maintain. They proclaim more
insistently justification by works than even the Papists.!

Most of the Anabaptist communities previously
described were in Switzerland and southern Ger-
many. They had always refused to countenance
having recourse to the sword, and the disaster of
1525 taught them more clearly than ever to abstain
from attempts at political reform. Their tone was
religious and theological. But about 1530 a new and
powerful influence came into the movement in
western and northern Germany, which changed
its pacific character. A belief that the coming of
Christ and the end of the world were near had been
held here and there, but it became prominent in the
ardent preaching of Melchior Hoffmann in Stras-
burg in 1529. At first, he confined himself to de-
picting vividly the conditions in the last days and

1 Sabbata, iii, 232.

THE ANABAPTISTS 19

the reign of the saints which would then begin, but
he did not advocate the adoption of active measures
for hastening the time. Before long, however, he
abandoned the doctrine of passive waiting and pro-
claimed the right of the elect to use the sword
against the godless principalities and powers of the
world. In the following two years the Melchiorites
spread rapidly through the valley of the Rhine and
the Netherlands.

Hoffmann declared that Strasburg was to be the
New Jerusalem, where the Lord would appear, and
from which the saints would march forth to establish
the kingdom of heaven on earth. The date of the
appearance would be the year 1533. His exciting
preaching had such influence in Strasburg and drew
to the city such eager crowds from the lower Rhine,
that he was imprisoned by the authorities, who took
also strong measures to convince his expectant dis-
ciples that any outbreak would be severely re-
pressed. The prudent opinion, therefore, began to
spread among the Brethren that because of its hard-
ness and unbelief the Lord had rejected Strasburg
from the honor of becoming the New Jerusalem, and
another starting-point must be found. This opinion
had substantial basis in the fact that the city au-
thorities held Hoffmann in prison, where, in fact,
he died ten years later. But as the torch dropped
from his hand, it was raised and brandished by Jan
Matthys, a baker of Haarlem. The missionaries of

20 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

the Melchiorite doctrines had had marked success in
Holland, and Matthys not only took up and
preached their gospel with fiery zeal, but added to it
the demand for immediate action. There was no
need to wait; the time was at hand. The remem-
brance of the disasters of the Peasants’ War had
lost somewhat of its vividness, but the seething
passions and determined aims which gave rise to the
war had lost none of their vitality. Moreover, in the
Netherlands these disasters had been felt compara-
tively little, so that men there were prepared to
renew the old struggle undeterred by bitter experi-
ence. It was from the Netherlands, therefore, that
the new impetus came. But it did not come until the
conditions were prepared for it in Germany. The
clock had struck wrong, but Matthys was to try
the experiment whether moving it into another room
would not set it right without altering the works.
Miinster was an important city in the German
province of Westphalia; and here in 1529 Bernhardt
Rothmann, a young priest, began preaching the doc-
trines of the Reformation, at first as a reformer
within the Church. After two years, however, he
decided to join the Lutheran party, and he en-
deavored to persuade his friends in the City Council
to align the city definitely with the so-called Evan-
gelicals. He succeeded so far as to gather a party
large enough to defy the conservatives and to pre-
vent his arrest. This division in the city made the

THE ANABAPTISTS 21

issue a political one. A further disturbing factor was
furnished by an epidemic of pestilence which had
recently swept the district, and by excessively high
prices for food. All the elements were present — re-
ligious, political, social — which had appeared in the
revolutionary movements elsewhere, and in 1533
Miinster was formally declared an Evangelical
town. A struggle then began with the Prince-Bishop,
in whose jurisdiction the city was. And it was at this
time that the impetus from outside came, which
constituted a crisis in the fortunes of Anabaptism
and.made Miinster famous in its history.

The Brethren at Strasburg, as has been said, had
been coming to the conviction that the New Jerusa-
lem must be found elsewhere; and hearing of Miin-
ster’s zeal for the Lord, they began turning their
eyes to it in hopes that this might be the capital of
the new kingdom. Many others were attracted from
the awakened communities in the Netherlands; and
among them two of the Apostles of Jan Matthys
came to Miinster, proclaiming that God had sent a
new prophet into the world to herald the end of all
things and the beginning of the millennium, and
that he would soon set up his and God’s kingdom
at Miinster. As all were eager to have part in the
kingdom but as this was possible for those only who
had been baptized properly, that is, in adult ma-
turity, the whole population, magistrates and citi-
zens, clergy and laity, men and women, became wild

pap HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

with religious excitement and zeal for baptism.
While the enthusiasm was at its height, Jan Bockel-
son, or John of Leyden, and another missionary
arrived. Bockelson was twenty-five years old,
handsome, eloquent, masterful, and it was not long
before all the women of Miinster were devoted to
him and he became the leader in the town. He mod-
estly denied that he was the prophet whose coming
had been predicted, but he had been sent, a John
the Baptist, to prepare the way. He put many mem-
bers of the working-classes into positions of promi-
nence, and established a common fund for property,
which was supplied at first by voluntary contribu-
tions, though afterward by requisition. But the
wheels of the millennium did not run altogether
smoothly. Fastening the weather-vane due south
does not keep off northerly storms. There were
members of the Town Council who were not pre-
pared to adopt fully the new régime, to declare
Miinster an independent Jerusalem, and to cut
themselves off from that Empire in which all their
days had been spent. They appealed to the Bishop
to exercise his authority; but instead of sending
troops, which, as he was a medieval and not a
modern bishop, was quite within his power, he is-
sued a proclamation to see whether barking would
not take the place of biting.

For a fortnight no direct outbreak occurred.
Then on February 9, 1534, in the early morning, a

THE ANABAPTISTS e3

. band of Anabaptist soldiers seized the centre of the
town. The conservatives soon gathered their forces
and made a stand, Evangelicals and Catholics to-
gether, the old Empire against the new kingdom.
They sent another message to the Bishop, urging
his immediate aid. This he promised, on condition
that two of the town gates should be left free to
him after the suppression of the disorder. By this
time, however, the Evangelicals began to foresee
that if the Bishop’s troops came and with their aid
suppressed the Anabaptists, the next step would be
that they themselves and the cause of the Reforma-
tion would be suppressed. After some street skir-
mishing, therefore, a truce between the contending
parties in the city was arranged, and when the
Bishop and his troops arrived outside the walls,
they found the gates closed against them. The
truce, however, meant that the Anabaptist party
were gaining the upper hand; and by their direction
Rothmann, who had inaugurated the movement in
Miinster five years before, sent the following letter
throughout Westphalia and the Netherlands:

Bernhardt Rothmann, the servant of the Heavenly
Father, to all his brethren who dwell among the heathen,
health and divine blessing! Be it known to you all that
the Heavenly Father hath sent unto us certain prophets,
who proclaim the pure word of God with most marvellous
gift of tongue and in the spirit of everlasting salvation.
He who seeketh his everlasting salvation, let him forsake

24 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

all worldly goods, and let him with wife and with chil-
dren come unto us here to the New Jerusalem, to Zion,
to the Temple of Solomon! Besides the treasure in
heaven, it shall be requited to him tenfold in money and

in goods for that which he hath left behind him!?

This letter had its desired result with the people
for whom it was intended. Dissatisfied tradesmen,
unsuccessful farmers, pious visionaries, fugitive
monks, social reformers, political adventurers — a
multitude came, filling the dusty roads to Miinster,
alone or with carts loaded with household goods.
Purpose had its fulfilment, as in the migration of
Abram and his family: “They went forth to go into
the land of Canaan, and into the land of Canaan
they came.”’ Many were sincere enthusiasts, confi-
dent that they had found the pearl of great price,
while others were selfish schemers, scrambling for
the oyster which contained it to eat. But the most
important arrival was that of the promised prophet,
Jan Matthys, with his beautiful wife, who had been
a nun in Haarlem. In a few days he summoned the
people to the market-place, where, producing like
Moses two tablets of stone, he announced that the
Lord of Hosts had commissioned himself and John
of Leyden to teach the people the pure word and
service of God, and he assured them that against the
city of the Saints the powers of this world could not
prevail. “Almighty be our doctrine and our power,”

1 E. Belfort Bax, The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptists, p. 153.

THE ANABAPTISTS 25

he exclaimed, “and praised be the will of our Father,
who has sent us here to found the New Jerusalem,
the city of Regeneration, the thousand years’ King-
dom, according unto His Holy pleasure!”

One who should make such an announcement to-
day would discredit himself by the very announce-
ment. But suppose a situation in which religious
interests took the place which politics has with us;
suppose the social unrest as great as in Russia; re-
member that the lack of ready communication with
the outside world would create such a lack of the
sense of proportion that local affairs would seem the
important centre of the universe; remember, too,
that the majority of the inhabitants of Miinster at
this time were without regular occupation, drawn
thither in the expectation of supernatural manifes-
tations and social upheaval — and it will not seem
altogether strange that they should lend themselves
readily to the first leader who could play upon the
instrument so fully tuned. Moreover, underneath
these local conditions there was a definite platform
of convictions held by many throughout Europe who
had been stirred by the principles of the Reforma-
tion. These convictions were, the right of private
judgment as opposed to authority in religion, with
the possibility of special divine revelation to every
individual; the equality of all Christians, their duty
consequently to hold all things in common, and the
abolition of priestly mediators; the near approach

26 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

of the end of the world, with the establishment of
God’s kingdom on earth. It was a presumption that
these views were true, that they were for the most
part not held by the rich and learned; for had not the
kingdom been promised to the poor and lowly, and
was not the Saviour of the world a carpenter and
a convict? The last article of this creed, ‘however,
was not held by the Anabaptists of southern Ger-
many; but in the northwest it was the tinder ready
to take fire when the spark should be struck. From
the belief that the day of vengeance was near at
hand, it was but a step to the confidence that the ~
glorious day could be hastened by the active assist-
ance of the elect.

Our contemporary accounts of the Anabaptists
were, as I have said, all written by their enemies,
and hostile prejudice undoubtedly colored the ac-
counts; such, for example, as the report made to
Bishop Franz von Waldeck, that “‘so soon as the
town [Miinster] had come into their power, they did
utterly overthrow all divine Christian order and
justice, all spiritual and temporal rule and policy,
and did set up a bestial life.” In the city there were
undoubtedly, as in any such promiscuous assem-
blage, instances of ignorance, foolishness, lust, cruel-
ty, crime. But there can be little question that the
majority of the people were upright, sincere in be-
- lief, and, according to their lights, lofty of aim. It
was a pitiful attempt to realize a noble ideal. Like

THE ANABAPTISTS 27

the builders of the Tower of Babel, they attempted
to bridge earth and heaven with earthly materials.
The system against which they revolted was far
worse than that by which they attempted to replace
ite
The Holy City of Zion was now definitely estab-
lished in Miinster. Another reign of the saints had
begun. But the forces of the Bishop outside were
besieging the town, and within there were doubters
and traitors and spies. It was necessary to sift out
the godless. Early on a bitter February morning
armed bands of Anabaptists went through the city,
arousing all the inhabitants, separating the faithful,
that is, those who had received adult baptism, from
the heathen, that is, the unbaptized, and giving the
latter the choice of immediate baptism or of being
driven from the city. Conscience was not all on one
side; for a large number of men, women, and children
preferred facing the winter and the Bishop rather
than submitting to a ceremony which was in their
eyes, at the least, meaningless. Of those who remained
three hundred were baptized that day, and the same
process of sanctification was continued for two
days more.

A scheme of communism was now proclaimed —
not a complete community of all goods but only of
money. Rothmann declared: “A Christian durst
have no money, be it silver or gold. All that Chris-
tian brethren or sisters have belongs to the one as

28 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

much as to the other. The brethren shall possess no
other thing but their food, clothes, house, and home.
It is mine as well as thine, and thine as well as
mine.” While the community thus claimed the right
over all property, though it was money alone which
was wholly confiscated, public officers decided how
much food and clothing each property-owher must
contribute for the support of the poorer citizens, and
allowed him to retain the rest until it should be
needed. A common free table was established in each
of the wards of the city, where all might eat.
Obedience to the inner revelation was the funda-
mental loyalty of the Anabaptists, and Jan Matthys
was, like St. Paul, not disobedient to what he re-
garded as the heavenly vision. One day, in the midst
of a dinner which he was giving to his friends, his
manner suddenly changed. He seemed absorbed and
listening to an inward voice. Then he threw up his
hands, rose from the table, and exclaimed, “Oh
dear Father, not as I will but as thou wilt!’ He
proceeded to kiss each guest, bade them farewell
with “God’s peace be with you all!” and left the
room. The next day he took about twenty com-
panions with him, and the little band passed through
the gate and proceeded to attack the whole of the
Bishop’s army. The forlorn hope was at once, of
course, cut to pieces. Matthys’s body especially was
hacked to bits, and the Bishop’s men then called
over the walls to the Anabaptists and invited them

THE ANABAPTISTS 29

to come and get their leader. The view held by hos-
tile critics that Matthys was a selfish demagogue,
seeking position and power for personal ends, is dis-
proved by the useless sacrifice of his heroic death.
Jan Bockelson— John of Leyden — now suc-
ceeded to the position of leader; and as John Robin-
son said of a very different adventurer nearly a
century later, “If any man brought oars, he brought
sails.” He began at once to make his position more
absolute by abolishing the City Council and taking
all power into his own hands. He encouraged the
religious fanatacism which manifested itself in wild
dances through the streets by the women, and in
hunts for the godless by mobs with swords drawn
and shouts of “Father, Father, give us light!” He
established a policy which has been, on the one
hand, denounced as unchecked licentiousness, and,
on the other hand, defended as justifiable. By the
edict which his cabinet issued, all existing marriages
were dissolved; every adult man and woman must
be married; polygamy was established; the choice of
a husband was left to the woman, and the original
wives might choose their former husbands on condi-
tion that they should embrace the new-comers with
“Welcome, dear Christian sister!’ That the new
order of things did not aim to abolish all orderly
relations between the sexes is shown by the fact
that choice was put into the hands of the women,
and also by the passage of a severe edict against

30 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

adultery. However mixed the motives for the step
may have been, there were some which were rational.
The women in Minster at the time of the siege out-
numbered the men by some three to one. Under the
feudal system, which was just breaking up, it was
not safe for a woman to be without a protector, and
especially was this the case in troublous times. If
the Kingdom of the Saints was to be established
permanently and to extend, the population of its
capital city must be kept up, not merely by doubtful
additions of the godless from the world without but
by the increase of the godly within. Moreover, did
not the Bible declare that polygamy was the divinely
ordered form of marriage in that society which the
saints were to take as their model? In spite of these
excellent arguments for the new order of things, it
did not work altogether smoothly. The dear Chris-
tian sisters who had been welcomed sometimes made
trouble; so that many quarrelsome women who per-
sisted in saying, “It was her fault!’ had to be sent
to reflect in prison, and the authorities had to
recognize that even to the saints divorce must on
such occasions be permitted.

Bockelson, of course, made haste to adjust hick
self to the new order of things. He took three wives,
one of whom, Divara, the beautiful widow of Mat-
thys, he proclaimed queen, and ordered the others
to obey her. Position and power to one of light
head are like salt water: the more he drinks of them,

THE ANABAPTISTS 31

the thirstier he becomes. The scenic and dramatic
instincts were strong in Bockelson, and he well
understood the value of splendor in securing defer-
ence and establishing authority. Whenever he ap-
peared in public, he was gorgeously dressed in silk
and velvet, surrounded by a numerous body-guard,
on his head a crown of gold glittering with jewels, a
jewelled sceptre in his hand, and around his neck a
heavy gold chain, which, with other mementos of
a widely different kind, is still preserved in Miinster.
He himself, so he announced, was wholly unworthy
of all this magnificence; it was befitting and neces-
sary to him only as the representative of the Most
High. It was but a suggestive foretaste of that
soon coming day when the tables and chairs at the
feasts of all the saints should be of silver, and gold
should be of no more account than the stones of the
streets. |

These representations were accepted by the ma-
jority of the people, and they continued to give him
their steadfast support throughout the siege. There
were, it is true, as is always the case, plots against
him; but his hold on the people enabled him to de-
feat them. On one occasion, for example, he pro-
claimed throughout the city that the joyful hour
had arrived when they all should go out, led by
himself, their king, to possess the Promised Land.
After some ten thousand persons had gathered in
the city square, Jan appeared with his splendid reti-

32 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

nue, and announced that he had only wished to
test them, for the hour had not yet come; but he
invited them all to be his guests at a feast. Benches
and tables, food and drink, were brought out, and
he with his courtiers and their ladies themselves
served. At the close, Jan stood up and declared that
God had relieved him of his dignity as king, and he
would now abdicate. Whereupon one of the prophets
arose and proclaimed that it had been revealed to
him by God that this intention of their dear brother,
however praiseworthy, should not be carried out,
but that he should remain king; to which the people
shouted a unanimous assent. Jan’s position was
therefore strengthened by this plebiscite.

It is interesting to notice that here, as elsewhere
in war-time, the necessity for recreation was strongly
felt. The passion for pageants was keen in the Mid-
dle Ages, and Jan took care that the people should
be kept amused, to distract them from the fighting,
the fortifying, the hunger, the quarrelling, and all
the miseries which the siege was pressing upon them.
But pageants and plays could not feed the city, and
that was now becoming a daily problem. For this
they were of no more value than a poultice to a
wooden leg. All private stores of food were seized
and all the animals killed, but still famine drew
nearer and nearer. The announcement was then
made that for four days all who wished to leave
the town could do so, but that any caught departing

THE ANABAPTISTS 33

after that time would be put to death as traitors.
Large numbers preferred to take their chances with
the Bishop’s army rather than face starvation
in the city. Of those who went many were put to
death by the Bishop’s troops. The remainder he
tried to drive back into the city; and when they
refused to stir for this purpose, and most of the men
had been killed, those who were left were scattered
in groups in different towns throughout the prov-
ince. Their fate, however, did not deter others
from escaping. Bockelson had availed himself of his
royal privilege, and by this time — April, 1535 —he
had fifteen wives. Fourteen of these, together with
large numbers of other women and almost all the
children, left the city, probably by the connivance
of the authorities, in spite of the severe edict against
desertions; for dogs, cats, rats, and mice had been
eaten, and there are hints of cannibalism having
occurred. Gresbeck, however, who was in the town
throughout the siege and who became the hostile-
minded chronicler of it, says in his “Geschichts-
quellen des Bisthums Minster,” that of this he found
no evidence.

This man Gresbeck had been prominent in the
affairs of Miinster; but he decided to quit the ship,
now that it was plainly sinking. On May 24, 1535,
he with five others climbed the wall; and when they
were taken by the Bishop’s soldiers, they told of the
straits to which the city was reduced, described the

34. HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

weak places in the defences, proposed a plan for an
advantageous attack, and offered, for a sum of
money, to lead the besiegers into the city. The offer
was accepted; and on the night of June 24 Gresbeck
and one of his companions, Hans von der Langen
Straten, led a band of the Bishop’s men to where
the moat was shallow and the garrison was weak.
Their scaling-ladders were undetected until the at-
tacking party were on the wall and in the streets.
Then ensued fierce fighting from street to street and
house to house. John of Leyden’s palace was entered
just as he escaped from it. His wife, however, was
captured and compelled to give up the keys to the
city gates, which were opened and through which
the whole of the Bishop’s forces streamed into the
doomed city. Still the fight went on, one little band
of the Anabaptists after another being cut to pieces,
until at last, by noon of June 25, 1535, resistance -
had ceased. The slaughter, however, did not cease.
The town was given over to the soldiery for plunder
and destruction. Men and women were thrown from
windows to be caught on spears below. The streets
and houses were filled with the dead. Those who
escaped the massacre by being taken prisoners went
to death, most of them, with a little more formality
after being sentenced to execution. Among these was
John of Leyden’s “queen,” the beautiful Divara,
who refused to renounce her Anabaptist faith and
who was beheaded in front of the Cathedral.

THE ANABAPTISTS 35

Bockelson himself, after his escape from the pal-
ace, hid in one of the gate-towers. But the feeling
which prompts a boy to show himself of importance
through possessing valuable knowledge led such a
boy to betray the hiding-place to the searching
soldiers. Jan endeavored to keep them at a distance
by commanding them not to lay hands on the Lord’s
anointed. But they rushed upon him with shouts of
“Straw king, if thou hast any power, save thyself
from us!’ On being brought before the Bishop, the
latter asked him in derision, with perhaps the
thought of a greater trial in mind, “Art thou a
king?” To which John of Leyden replied, “Art thou
a bishop?” And when asked by what right he had
usurped power over Miinster, he again boldly re-
turned the question, “Who hath given thee right
and power over the city of Minster?” The Bishop
replied that he had been elected by the Cathedral
Chapter and confirmed by the Emperor and the
Pope; to which John answered, “And I have been
called to the leadership by God and his prophets.”
When he was reproached with the sufferings and
losses he had caused, he said that, rather than sur-
render, he would have held out till everyone in the
city had starved to death, and that, if the Bishop
wished to recoup himself for his expenses, he could
put him, Jan, in a cage and exhibit him at a gulden
a head, for the Bishop could pay all the cost of the
war and his private debts besides from those who

36 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

would be eager to see the King of Zion. “Good!”
said the Bishop; “I will shut thee up in a cage in-
deed, but otherwise than thou hopest.”

Two others of the Anabaptist leaders, Bernhardt
Knipperdollinck and Bernhardt Krechting, had
been captured at the fall of the city, and they, to-
gether with Jan Bockelson, were put each into an
iron cage, carried through the towns and villages of
the duchy, and exposed to the insults of the multi-
tudes who thronged to see them. After being ex-
hibited and imprisoned for six months, they were
taken back to the city where Jan had reigned mag-
nificent and absolute in power, and there in the
market-place their flesh was tortured with hot
pincers, their tongues were torn out, and they were
finally stabbed to death. Their bodies were then put
back into the cages in which they had been exhib-
ited, and these ghastly memorials were hung high
on the tower of the Church of St. Lamberti in
Miinster. There they hung undisturbed, except by
wind and storm, for three centuries and a half.
When the town was rebuilt about thirty years ago,
they were taken down and then again replaced.
They were hanging there when the World War broke
out. Whether these memorials of barbarous treat-
ment of conquered enemies are there still, I do not
know. Perhaps the same aim at frightfulness which
led to the destruction of Rheims Cathedral would

* Georg Tumbiilt, Die Wiedertiufer, p. 93.

THE ANABAPTISTS BF

lead to the preservation of the grim pendants of the
Lambertikirche.

The fall of Miinster was the destruction of the
militant type of Anabaptism, though one or two
fruitless attempts to revive it were made here and
there. From the first there had been in the move-
ment, as has been said, two different tendencies —
the one theological and ascetic, emphasizing adult
baptism as the key to Christian character, the sepa-
ration of Church and State, and the refusal to
resort to force; the other largely political and eco-
nomic, aiming at the establishment of the kingdom
of heaven on earth, and not hesitating to use vio-
lence in establishing it. But they that took the
sword perished by the sword; and it now remained
to be seen whether they had involved their more
peaceful brethren in their fall. The destruction of
the militant element at Miinster, however, gave
those who disapproved of the use of force an oppor-
tunity to regain the footing they had lost. They
were wise enough to see that their existence de-
pended upon dissociating themselves as far as pos-
sible from the Miinsterites. They heard the voice of
the Lord saying to them, as He had said to Isaiah,
“In returning and rest shall ye be saved; in quiet-
ness and in confidence shall be your strength.”

From this time Anabaptism ceased to aim at a
social revolution and became more distinctively a
religious movement. Its adherents, however, could

38 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

not outgrow the odium brought upon their name by
their Miinsterite brethren. For more than a century
among the circles of established order and govern-
ment throughout Europe the name “Anabaptist”
was equivalent to “Bolshevik” in our time, con-
noting dangerous socialistic and revolutionary ten-
dencies. The movement is frequently regarded as
a continuation or outbreak of the Peasants’ War,
which ended in 1525. Economic conditions were the
fundamental cause of both. But the latter was
mainly a revolt of the country’s serfs against the
feudal system, while the former was a town move-
ment, in which tradesmen were the chief and peas-
antry who sympathized with their aims were a
subordinate element. In both a prominent part was
taken by the preacher or prophet, who gave theo-
logical form to the profoundly religious convictions
held by many, probably by most of those in both
movements.

The wildest tempest cannot blow out the stars;
and after the fall of Miinster the conservative ele-
ments which existed in Germany and the Nether-
lands gradually took courage and came together in
Friesland under the leadership of Menno Simons.
He systematized the doctrines of the Anabaptists
and exhibited them as centering around the question
of infant baptism. This to him was the vital point
of division from his opponents, as circumcision was
to St. Paul. In every country at that time Church

THE ANABAPTISTS 39

and State were united, and all individuals, except
Jews, were compelled by law to become members of
the State Church by ‘baptism in infancy. The result
was that church membership had no relation to
personal belief, piety, uprightness. The very crimi-
nals in the prisons were church members in good
standing, for excommunication, except for con-
demned heretics, was almost unknown. Questions
then arose: Should church membership mean noth-
ing but birth? Should not those alone be recognized
as church members who credibly professed belief in
Christ and accepted him as their Master? Should
the Church be identical with the world, or separate
from it? Should it be implicated in the State’s use
of the sword, or should it confine itself to the sword
of the Spirit? Should the final authority in religion be
the magistrate or the Bible? Is belief to be pre-
scribed, or must there be liberty for the individual
conscience? Is the Church essentially a hierarchy,
or a body of believers? Away with the Mass, and
with all ritual, worship, and doctrine which cannot
be established on the authority of Scripture! And
in Scripture it is not the pre-Christian Old Testa-
ment that is to be the standard, but the Christian
New Testament; otherwise Judaism, heathenism,
worldliness will pervade the Church. “As long as
they baptize unconscious infants,” said Menno,!

1 In the Netherlands it was customary for ason to take his father’s
name, with the addition ‘‘zoon.” This name in common usage was

40 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

“esteem all whom they have baptized as Christians,
dispense the holy bread to the impenitent, and admit
all the avaricious, extortioners, pompous, intemper-
ate, and the like to the fellowship of their Church,
the world will continue to be their Church and their
Church the world.1” In the opinion of these Men-
nonites the Jews spoke more truly than they knew
when they said of the Temple, which should have
been composed of living members of Christ, “See
what manner of stones are here!”’

Menno was insistent on his wide difference from
the Miinsterites:

We are clear and free of the abominable doctrine, up-
roar, mutiny, blood-thirstiness, polygamy, and like abom-
ination of the false prophets. Yea, we hate and oppose
such teachings with all earnestness as evident heresy,
as snares to the conscience, as deception, seduction,
and fraud, and as pestilential doctrines accursed and
rejected by all Scripture. . . . Behold, kind reader, this
is my position and confession concerning the Miinster-
ites, and the position of all who are acknowledged and
accepted as brethren and sisters among us. . . . We ac-
knowledge that some of the false prophets were to out-
ward appearance baptized with the same manner of
baptism as we, just as also thieves, murderers, highway
robbers, sorcerers, and the like are baptized with you.

generally dropped. Menno Simons or Simonszoon is therefore always
referred to by his first, his proper name.

2 Complete works of Menno Simons (Elkhart, Indiana, U.S.A.,
1871), 11, 70.

THE ANABAPTISTS 41

Shall the good angels be unjustly judged for the sake of
Lucifer’s pride, and be meted out his punishment? Or
are all the apostles traitors for Judas’ sake? Were the
apostles responsible for it that the Nicolaitans had
their wives in common, as Eusebius relates? ... If we
then are Miinsterites for no other reason than because
of baptism, then they [our opponents] must be perjurers,
murderers, highwaymen, thieves, and rogues, for these
have received one baptism in common with them. This
cannot be gainsaid or denied. Oh, no; the Scriptures do
not teach that we are baptized into one body by any
outward sign, such as water, but that we are baptized
into one body by one Spirit.

Under Menno’s leadership Anabaptism acquired
cohesion and gained a footing. In 1546 he settled

near Oldesloe in Holstein on the estate of Bartholo-
mew von Ahlefeld, a nobleman who had witnessed
the persecution and martyrdom of the Anabaptists
in the Netherlands and, while not himself joining
them, had become convinced that they were a peace-
ful and useful people. Menno’s influence extended
into Holland; and after his death in 1559, this coun-
try became the centre of different groups of Ana-
baptists.

As the Anabaptist was by his very character an
individualist, the centrifugal force was stronger than
the centripetal. The “dissidence of dissent,” as Mat-
thew Arnold has called it, led to the establishment
of comparatively small groups here and there, at-

1 Works, ii, 326, 301, 82.

42 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

tached to some local leader and calling themselves
by his name, or dividing from their brethren as to
the importance of some doctrine or custom, often
unimportant, or even absurd; such, for example, as
the stand taken by the Swiss followers of Jakob
Amman in the rejection of the use of buttons and
of the practice of shaving. But behind all these dif-
ferences, there was a consensus of doctrines and
practices which markedly differentiated the Ana-
baptists from both Catholics and Protestants, and
gave them a distinctive position in the world of their
time and an important influence not only upon it
but upon succeeding ages. As they settled down into
law-abiding and industrious societies, the old hos-
tility to them declined. After 1581 persecution of
them ceased. Holland became a safe asylum for all
Protestant sects, Anabaptists included. In 1672 the
once-dreaded Anabaptists were legally recognized as
a religious body, with the right unhindered to exist-
ence and freedom of worship.

The Peasants’ War and the kingdom of Miinster
had made the name of Anabaptist feared in all the
countries of Europe. England especially endeavored
to establish a strict quarantine against the importa-
tion of the infection. In 1535, and again in 1538,
severe edicts were issued there, threatening death
or. banishment to “divers and sundry strangers of
the sect and false opinion of the Anabaptists and
Sacramentaries, being lately come into this realm.”

THE ANABAPTISTS 43

In 1536 ten persons were caught in this net and put
to death, and ten others saved themselves by re-
canting.

In spite of this zeal for the true faith, Anabaptism
spread in England and, what was worse from the
conservative point of view, its doctrines spread and
formed an innovating leaven of unrest among many
who never became Anabaptists. In Holland a group
had formed around Henrick Nicklaes, or ““H.N.,” as
he is commonly called. One of his disciples, Christo-
pher Vitell, an Englishman, on his return to England
in the reign of Queen Mary, brought over H. N.’s
books and doctrines and established the Family of
Love. As was said of David Georg, who was the
master of Nicklaes, so it might be said of Nicklaes
and Vitell, that the former laid the egg but the latter
brought forth the chicken. The Familists were ac-
cused by their opponents of immoral practices; and,
while this is not certain — for their history is ob-
scure—it is plain that they excited little direct
influence as a body upon the national life, and they
disappear in the multitudes of the sects which
seethed in England in the middle of the seventeenth
century. But they formed apparently a nursery for
the growth of Anabaptist seed transplanted from
Holland. Puritans, Separatists, Brownists, Inde-
pendents, Ranters, Quakers, all sat at the table fur-
nished by Anabaptism, and ate, some of one dish,
some of another. Those of largest appetite were the

44 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

followers of Robert Browne, afterward called Inde-
pendents or Congregationalists. Of these in 1593
there were 20,000 in England —so lamented Sir
Walter Raleigh in Parliament.

In those stirring times, eager with the awakening
of ecclesiastical liberty, it is not easy to say who
was indebted to whom. The whole Protestant world
was studying logic. If Luther could throw off the

authority of the Church of Rome, why s should 1 not
the Anabaptists throw off the authority « of Luther?
Why should not the Independent separate from the
Church of England? Why should any man recognize
any higher authority than himself? Stopping at any
other resting place seemed illogical. To the eager
progressive, the recognized Church — Roman, Lu-
theran, Calvinist, Anglican — seemed like a wharf.
Vessel after vessel swings off from it and goes out
on a wealth-producing voyage; but it stays with its
feet in the mud and its face against all the currents,
holding only what has been dumped on it. The result
of this logical ferment was the formation of many
a sect whose foundation was absolute in individualism,
with with hardly er enough community-mortar to hold it
together. This tendency of division to divide found
classic expression more than two centuries later
among the Irvingites, or members of the Catholic
Apostolic Church, as they called themselves. In a
little town in Scotland the members of this body
had seceded from one another, set after set, until

THE ANABAPTISTS 45

only two, an old man and an old woman, were left. |
A friend said to the woman, “Well, Janet, I suppose
you consider that you and John are the only true |
representatives of the Apostles left in the world.”
“Weel, mon,” said she, “I’m naesosureo’ John.”

Out of this ecclesiastical welter, at the end of the
sixteenth century, there emerges a John Smyth,
preacher to the city of Lincoln in 1600, and in 1607
pastor of a Separatist congregation in Gainsborough.
The region had been sown with Anabaptist seed,
and some of it sprouted. The decision arrived at by
Smyth and his friends, that the Church of England
was not according to the pattern of the New Testa-
ment, naturally brought them into difficulty with
the authorities, especially as many others had ar-
rived at the same decision. Governor Bradford says:

After these things they could not long continue in any
peaceable condition, but were hunted and persecuted
on every side, so as their former afflictions were but as
flea-bitings in comparison of these which now came upon
them. For some were taken & clapped up in prison;
others had their houses besett & watcht night and day
& hardly escaped their [their watchers’] hands; and ye
most were faine to flie & leave their houses & habita-
tions and the means of their livelehood.*

Smyth and his church decided, though the ports
were watched against unlicenced emigration, to es-

1 William Bradford, History of Plimouth Plantation, ch. 1 (6).

46 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

cape and join some of their friends who were already
settled at Amsterdam. This they succeeded in doing.

Meanwhile in Nottinghamshire in England, the
country adjacent to Lincolnshire in which Gains-
borough is situated, lived Thomas Helwys, whose
house was a gathering-centre for the Puritan clergy
and others who were discussing the vital ecclesiasti-
cal problems of the day. Before long, the discussion
became too absorbing to admit of any other occu-
pation. If the Christian Church ought to consist of
Christians only, then the Church of England could
be no true Church. Then one should separate from
it. But since it was impossible for a Separatist to
live in England outside a jail, one should leave Eng-
land. So reasoned Thomas Helwys, and he left. In
saying one should leave, it apparently did not occur
to his logical mind to say two should leave. For
when he got away to Holland without arrest, as he
managed to do, it was without his wife. She was
soon arrested and imprisoned; after which she dis-
appears.

Helwys did not go to Amsterdam merely for the
sake of attending a church of which he approved.
He at once became an active member of John
Smyth’s congregation, and soon a contentious mem-
ber. In every zealous religious controversy there is
danger of a loss of the sense of proportion, that sense
which insists that great things shall be kept great
and small things small. The small tends to be mag-

THE ANABAPTISTS 47

nified, and the greatness of the great to be sub-
merged. The fly on the window-pane becomes a bull
in the meadow. So we find Smyth and Helwys soon
coming to argumentative blows with the Church of
England Separatists already established in Amster-
dam, over the question whether it was permissible to
use a translation of the Bible in public worship.
Again they took their stand on logic. No apocrypha-
writing but only the canonical Scriptures are to be
used in the Church in the time of God’s worship;
every written translation is an apocrypha-writing
and not canonical Scripture; therefore, every written
translation is unlawful in the Church in the time of
God’s worship. The “teachers” should bring the
original Hebrew and Greek and translate from them
by voice. How it was that this avoided irreverence
of translation and preserved the sacred character of
inspired Scripture, they did not point out. But
Smyth insisted that “There is no better warrant to
bring translations of Scripture into the Church and
to read them as parts and helps of worship than to
bring in expositions, paraphrases, and sermons upon
the Scripture, seeing all these are equally human
in respect of the work, equally divine in respect of
the matter they handle.’”!

Smyth’s book of “Differences” contains “Cer-
tayne Demandes whereto wee desire direct and
sound answer with proof from the Scriptures.”

1 John Smyth, Differences of the Churches of the Separation, p. 10.

48 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

Among the sixty-one questions are the following:
“Whether metre, rhythm, and time be not quench-
ing the Spirit? Whether voluntary be not as neces-
sary in tune and words as in matter?”

The basis of the system of thought descending
from the Anabaptists through the Separatists to
Smyth and Helwys was individual freedom. The
established order of any sort was not established by
the individual, and was therefore a limitation on his
freedom. Many of the Anabaptists and many of
their ecclesiastical heirs held to that belief, which
lies at the basis of mystical theology, that the less
there is of man, the more there is of God. They
therefore have deprecated the characteristics of
strong personality, such as a foreseeing purpose and
preparation for public speaking, and have identified
the individual with his present self, his temporary
feeling and desire. There must be no check on what
each individual feels inwardly prompted to do.
However fully good sense held them back from
thorough-goingness in carrying out this conclusion,
it was the end to which their train of thought and
practice tended.

In Amsterdam Smyth and Helwys met the Men-
nonites, who, under their different name, were per-
petuating the doctrines of the conservative Ana-
baptists. Soon the two seekers for the true Church
discovered how necessary to the completenessof their
individualistic position was the doctrine of adult

THE ANABAPTISTS 49

baptism. They began to taunt their Separatist Eng-
lish brethren in Amsterdam with their illogicality
in regarding the Church of England as no true
Church and yet as holding valid their own bap-
tism by it when infants. Either both Church and
baptism were true, or both were false. Glimpses of
the dilemma had before this dawned upon the Sepa-
ratists; but they had looked the other way, through
the fear that by permitting re-baptism they would
identify themselves with the dreaded Anabaptists.
But Smyth could not go on without the comfort of
a valid baptism. For this he did not turn to the
Mennonites, and it would have been of no use to
turn to his Separatist brethren. He therefore took
the only course open to him and baptized him-
self, thus gaining the name by which he came to
be known — the “Se-baptist.”” He then baptized
Thomas Helwys and others, and they proceeded to
elect Smyth anew as pastor, with other officers, thus
establishing for the first time among Englishmen,
as they believed, a true Church after the primitive
apostolic pattern. They did not then see the con-
tradiction involved between the doctrine of an inner
light which should direct belief, conduct, and organ-
ization, and the acceptance of the Bible as furnish-
ing an authoritative standard for all these. Did not
the existence of any external standard invalidate
the autonomy of an internal standard? Moreover the
inner light was not that of each individual, but it

$0 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTURS

was that of certain individuals acting upon what
they conceived to be the utterances of the Bible.
The scheme that resulted had neither the authority
of antiquity nor that of the individual conscience.
The attempt to be absolutely independent has al-
ways resulted in having some props to lean on.
This act of self-baptism aroused an ecclesiastical
tempest. If he insisted on adult baptism, why did
not Smyth turn to the Mennonites, who had long
practised it? If adult baptism constituted a true
Church, were not the Mennonites a true Church?
These considerations, newly examined, appeared to
Smyth at first possible, then weighty, then convinc-
ing. There had indeed then been a true Church in
existence at the time he baptized himself and the
others, and his action was therefore disorderly.
They ought consequently to begin all over again,
and receive baptism from the officers of this newly
found true Church. But Helwys was firm. He had
gone a mile with Smyth, but he would not be com-
pelled to go twain. He would have nothing to do
with another baptism. This was maintaining the
necessity of an apostolic succession as tyrannous as
that of the Church of England or Rome itself.
Moreover there was no certainty as to where the
Mennonites got their authority to administer adult
baptism, no assurance therefore that it went back
to the Apostles. Did anybody know by what author-
ity John the Baptist was himself baptized? Was it

THE ANABAPTISTS 51

not all Christ’s followers, and not ecclesiastical
officers only, to whom he gave the command to
make disciples and baptize? Among Smyth’s many
errors — for he held views on the Incarnation which
Helwys did not regard as sound — the chief was
“That the Church and ministry must come by Suc-
cession, contrary to his former profession in word
and writing. And shat by a supposed succession he
cannot shew from whom nor when nor where.” !
Helwys therefore, and some dozen of his friends,
proceeded to “cast out” Smyth and his friends, and
to constitute themselves a Church of apostolic purity.

In reading of these petty ecclesiastical squabbles

there is danger of falling into the same error into _
which the authors of them fell — a loss of the sense__
of proportion. The points at issue were small, but
the aim behind these was great. Both Helwys and
Smyth were loyally seeking for the truth and the
truth only. To live was with them to progress; for
they knew that the steps of a ladder are made not
to stand on but to ascend by. They were at one
with their opponent, Reverend John Robinson, in
the conviction that ““God hath yet more light to
break forth out of His Holy Word.”

And not only was this, their underlying aim, a
noble one, but their judgment in regard to it, while
partial, was sound as to the part which they saw.

They felt the vast importance of the individual ele-
1 4 Declaration of Faith, sig. B 2.

Le. HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

ment in human life, and they tracked it to its re-
motest development and honored it there. To the
corporate side of life — its necessary interrelations
with others, its moulding through heredity and en-
vironment, the absorption of character through at-
mosphere — to this they were blind. The world needs
to have many aspects of life pressed on its attention,
one from one source and another from another. It is
unfair to demand of one advocate that he should
present all. If he utters his special message faith-
fully, he is doing the world a service.

Smyth’s leanings toward the Mennonites con-
tinued. But the next year atter his separation from
Helwys — 1612 — they ceased to have interest for
him; for by his death then he left the society which
had been to him truly a Church militant, and joined
that true Church for which all his life long he had
been seeking. Three years after his death his con-
gregation joined the Mennonites. About the time of
his death Helwys and his handful of followers came
to the conclusion that it was wrong to avoid persecu-
tion, and that they ought therefore to give the Eng-
lish authorities a chance at them. They consequently
returned to England, and soon found what they
sought. By 1613 John Murton, Helwys’s chief
helper, was in prison, and Helwys himself followed
soon. His fate for the next two or three years is un-
certain; but by April 8, 1616, when his uncle, Geof-
frey Helwys, made his will, and when William

THE ANABAPTISTS 53

Shakespeare had just finished making his, Thomas
Helwys was dead.

To the end of his life Helwys was, from the eccle-
siastical point of view, a layman. But he and his
followers maintained that they constituted a Church,
and though he had never been ordained, he was not
only their leader but their pastor. Under John Mur-
ton, after his release from prison, the little church
in London grew. It and the branches it sent out be-
came a nucleus around which gathered many Dis-
senters who could not be Presbyterians because of
their objection to infant baptism, predestination,
and a closely organized Church government. Hel-
wys’s Church had called itself Baptist. This was
probably not an abbreviation of “Anabaptist,” for
they wished to avoid any suggestion of that dreaded
name; but it pointed to the importance they at-
tached to baptism as the centre of the Christian
faith.

The mode of baptism, which to their successors
has seemed a vital matter worth fighting for, was
to these early Baptists of little importance. The
majority of the Mennonites practised baptism by
pouring a little water on the head of the candidate,
though a branch of them, the Collegianten, brought
into Holland in 1619 the custom of dipping the
whole body under water. This they had perhaps
borrowed from Switzerland or Poland; for immer-
sion was practised in the former country by the

54 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

Unitarian Anabaptists as early as 1525, and in the
latter before 1550. The thought underlying aftusion
was that of washing, cleansing, of which the poured
water was the symbol. The thought underlying im-
mersion was that of burial with Christ and rising
again with Him. It was not until1640 that immersion
was introduced into England, and not until 1644
that it was prescribed by the Confession of Faith of
seven Calvinist Baptist churches in London as the
only authorized mode of baptism.

While Smyth and Helwys were by no means the
only channels through which the influence of Ana-
baptism flowed into England, for, as I have said, it
was denounced there as a public danger as early as
1535, their books had great weight in shaping the
thought of their time which was tending to tolera-
tion in religion and democracy in government. It
was John Smyth who drew up the principles of
church government which the Pilgrims carried with
them in the ship Mayflower from Amsterdam to
Plymouth in New England in 1620. For when
Smyth abandoned the Church of England in 1606,
the question arose how he and his friends at Gains-
borough should constitute the new Church which
they desired to form. A member of the society, John
Murton, the same who afterwards became Helwys’s
lieutenant, describes their method of procedure.
“Do we not know,” he says, “the beginning of his
[Smyth’s] Church? that there was first one stood

THE ANABAPTISTS 55

up and then another, and these two joined together
and so a third, and these became a Church, say
they.” 1 To this procedure Smyth gave a name taken
from the Old Testament, a name which has done
honorable service in the Churches of his order to this
day. This step he declared constituted a “cove-
nant.”’ Governor Bradford describes it more fully:

So many therefore of these professors as saw the evil
of these things in these parts and whose hearts the Lord
had touched with heavenly zeal for his truth, they shook
off this yoke of antichristian bondage, and as the Lord’s
free people joined themselves, by a covenant of the
Lord, into a church estate in the fellowship of the Gos-
pel, to walk in all His ways made known, or to be made
known, according to their best endeavours, whatever it
should cost them, the Lord assisting them.?

According to Edward Winslow in his “ Brief Nar-
ration” of 1646, it was this covenant adopted at
Gainesborough which formed the foundation of the
Church in Plymouth, New England. “They also,”
he says, “entered into covenant with God and one
another to walk in all His ways revealed or as they
should be made known unto them, and to worship
Him according to His will revealed in His written
word only.” * The Massachusetts Bay Colony also,

1 A Description of what God hath predestinated concerning Man,
p- 169.

2 History of Plimouth Plantation, ch. 1 (6).

3 Young’s Chronicles, p. 387.

56 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

led by John Cotton, adopted the same plan: “I am
sure Mr. Cotton hath made some use of those prin-
ciples and arguments on which Mr. Smyth and
others went concerning the constitution of the
Christian Church.” *

A difference of emphasis led to a division into two
channels of the stream which had been fed-by Ana-
baptist sources. On the one hand were those who
held that the act constituting a Church was the
covenant and that baptism was the seal of this
covenant, to be administered to those who were
already within the Church. On the other hand,
others maintained that baptism was the means for
constituting a Church and for admitting to it those
who were without. The former became Congrega-
tionalists, the latter Baptists.

It has generally been the case that progress has
come first in the State and then in the Church.
With regard to democracy in America, however, the
Church was the leader. The formative power of a
“covenant” was recognized as too valuable to be
allowed to remain in the possession of the Church
only. When the Pilgrims from Holland in 1620
reached the shores of New England, they found that
in settling there they would be outside the limits of
the patent which had been granted them in England,
and therefore without civil authority. This did not
deter them, for they proceeded to create such au-
thority by a covenant. They met in the cabin of their

1 Roger Williams’s Answer to Fohn Cotton, 1644, ch. 9.

THE ANABAPTISTS 57

vessel, the Mayflower, and drew up the following
agreement, which has come to be called the May-
flower Compact:

In the name of God, Amen. We, whose names are
underwritten, the loyal subjects of our dread sovereign
lord, King James, by the grace of God, of Great Britain,
France, and Ireland king, defender of the faith, &c.,
having undertaken, for the glory of God and advance-
ment of the Christian faith and honour of our king and
country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the north-
ern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and
mutually, in the presence of God and one of another,
covenant and combine ourselves together into a civil
body politic, for our better ordering and preservation
and furtherance of the ends aforesaid; and by virtue
hereof to enact, constitute, and frame such just and
equal laws, ordinances, acts, constitutions, and offices,
from time to time, as shall be thought most meet and
convenient for the general good of the colony, unto
which we promise all due submission and obedience.
In witness whereof we have hereunder subscribed our
names at Cape Cod the 11th of November, in the year
of the reign of our sovereign lord, King James, of Eng-
land, France, and Ireland the eighteenth, and of Scot-
and the fifty-fourth. Anno Domini 1620.1

There was a list of forty-eight signers.? Of this
Compact it was said in 1802 by John Quincy Adams,

1 William Bradford, History of Plimouth Plantation, bk. ii, ch.1.
(Spelling modernized.)

2 Not given in Bradford, but in New England’s Memorial, Thomas
Morton.

58 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

afterwards President of the United States, “This is
perhaps the only instance in human history of that
positive, original social compact which speculative
philosophers have imagined as the only legitimate
source of government. Here was a unanimous and
personal assent by all the individuals of the com-
munity to the association by which they became a
nation.” }

I am not aware that the inheritors of the Ana-
baptist tradition in Europe after the seventeenth
century ever went so far as to attempt to apply
their democratic principles to the State. They were
interested in ecclesiastical matters. But the May-
flower Compact is the connecting link between this
earlier inheritance and the foundation stone of de-
mocracy in America—the Declaration of Inde-
pendence on July 4, 1776. The later utterance has
the same sturdy ring as the earlier: “We therefore,
the representatives of the United States, do in the
name of the good people of these colonies, solemnly
publish ... that these united colonies are, and of
right ought to be, free and independent states.”

I have mentioned the special views of this and

1 John A. Goodwin, The Pilgrim Republic, p. 65. ‘This was the
birth-place of popular constitutional liberty”; Bancroft’s United
States, i, 310. “It was here that the government based on the will of
the governed was first established on the American coast. ... This
was the first meeting of the kind of which the history of the world
gives us any information; and if we may judge of the wisdom of its

deliberations by their results, it has never been surpassed”; North
American Review, 1, 336, 340.

THE ANABAPTISTS 59

that body which from time to time handed on what
I have called the Anabaptist inheritance. For lack
of space I have said nothing of one of the most im-
portant of them — the Quakers. Let me sum up that
inheritance, looking back upon it as a whole. The
fundamental principle of the Anabaptists was the
immediate relation of the soul to God. No priestly
mediators, no intervening ritual, must be allowed
to come between a man and his Maker. “God and I;
I and God,’ was the solemn chant resounding
through the chambers in which the soul resided.
This constituted a common bond among men, the
deepest and strongest, sometimes leading to com-
munity of goods. Yet it was not a recognition of the
brotherhood of mankind which was implied in this;
that was still several centuries distant; but it was
believers only, those who heard God’s voice within
and responded to it, who were bound together thus
as brothers. To the medizval mind the Church was
an ark, whose function it was to save those inside
it; it had not awakened to the necessity and the
_ glory of saving the world outside. The Anabaptists
belonged in this respect to their day; their interest
was centred on those within. Believers only could
be church members; and this made infant baptism
meaningless and impossible, because an infant can-
not understand the gospel and deliberately and in-
telligently accept Christ. While adult baptism was
thus essential, the mode of it was indifferent. If one
ceased to be a consistent believer through moral

60 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

lapse or theological laxity, he must be promptly re-
moved from the body of the faithful until he should
amend his ways.

This system of minute and rigid discipline was
adhered to until comparatively recent times, though
it caused many a heart-burning and many a schism.
Luther had denied the freedom of the will; Calvin’s
predestinarianism_took away moral responsibility.
Until Jakobus Harmensen, or Arminius, being called
in 1604 to curse the enemies of Calvinism, turned
and blessed them, the Anabaptists were almost the
sole defenders of man’s moral responsibility and his

' freedom of will.

Every body of Christians then accepted the words
of the Bible, literally interpreted, as the final au-
thority, though to this the Roman Church added
tradition. It was long before there could come the
modern recognition that there is much in the Bible
which has the impress and the limitations of its
authors and its age, which yet embodies conceptions
that are eternal; long before biblical criticism could
ask its divinely bidden question, “Whose image and
superscription is this?” and could proceed to its im-
portant task of rendering to Cesar the things that
are Ceesar’s and to God the things that are God’s.
It is, therefore, only a matter of course that Ana-
baptist custom is found basing doctrines and prac-
tices on texts of Scripture which, according to
modern biblical study, give no warrant for them.
The Anabaptists were, therefore, often narrow, big-

THE ANABAPTISTS 61

oted, legalistic, fanatical. But here again they were
of their day; and their heirs have generally been
more ready to welcome the clearer light of modern
thought than have the established Churches which
cast them out. They were opposed to the union of
Church and State and to Church establishment.
They refused to pay taxes for the support of the
Church. They denounced war, though all except a
few loyally took part in it when summoned by the
governments under which they lived. They pro-
claimed universal toleration in days when toleration
was regarded as a sin and a crime. They proclaimed
freedom of conscience, freedom in teaching, organ-
ization, worship. They were, in short, the modern
men of their time.

I have endeavored to point out how much in our
present civilization which we regard as most pre-
cious, in religion, in society, in government, has come
to us as an inheritance from those sects which were
cast out and persecuted by the dominant and es-
tablished forms of religion in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. If the Anabaptist fathers
could look upon our modern world, they would see
almost all that they stood for adopted by it. They
have in great degree come to their own. And while
this is a belated compensation for their innumerable
and immeasurable sufferings, it is a large one.

Nore. — Since writing the above, I see that Professor Masson also,
in his Life of Yohn Milton (iii, 99), assigns to the Baptists the honor
of being the first to assert in English the full principle of liberty of
conscience.

II

JOACHIM OF FLORIS!

N southern Italy, in the year 1202, there died

a man who had a wide influence on hate of his
own time and on succeeding generations — Joachim,
Abbot of Floris in Calabria. He came of a rich and
noble family and had been brought up as a courtier
at the court of Roger, Duke of Apulia. It was the
fashion in those days to make a journey to Palestine.
To some it was a crusade, to some a pilgrimage, to
some both. Joachim set out to see the holy places
in luxury, as a wealthy young noble should, with
a retinue of servants. But when he reached Constan-
tinople, he found a pestilence raging there; which so
impressed him with the shortness and misery of life
that he dismissed his train and continued his journey
with only one companion. The story goes that he
fell in the desert, overcome with thirst. Perhaps a
modern reader might suspect that he carried some
Byzantine germs with him. But, as with the Apostle
Paul, the occasion proved to be his conversion. He
had a vision of a man standing by a river of oil,
that sacred element of priestly consecration, and
bidding him drink. This he did, and at once, though

previously unlearned, he was possessed of a knowl-

1 Other forms of this place-name are Fiore, Flore, Flora.

JOACHIM OF FLORIS 63

edge of all the Scripture. After passing his initiation
into sainthood by living for a long time at the bot-
tom of a well, he was rewarded at Easter by a burst
of glory and by the revelation of the hidden corre-
spondences between the Old Testament and the
New. This part of his history, however, it must be
remembered, has been handed down only by the
legends which gathered round him after his death.
But that they lasted until the seventeenth century
shows how deep an impression he had made.

After returning from the East, he kept away from
his father’s house and devoted himself to preaching
to the people. But as this was not permissible to a
layman, he became a priest and a member of the
Cistercian Order. Strict as this was, it did not satisfy
his appetite for austerities, and when he was chosen
Abbot of Corazzo, he could not endure the prospect
of such worldliness, and fled. But he was captured
and compelled to take up the duties of Abbot, until
he appealed to the Pope and obtained permission to
be de-abboted. He then retired to a hermitage. But
his reputation as a saint found him out and drew
adoring disciples. Some regulation of their com-
panionship was necessary, and this soon developed
into the establishment of a new Order. The Rule
which was adopted anticipated the Rule of St. Fran-
cis by a quarter of a century in taking poverty as
its foundation.! By 1196, when the Rule was for-

1 “Qui vere monachus est nihil reputat esse suum nisi citha-
ram.” In Apoc. 183 a 2.

64 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

mally approved by Pope Celestin ITI, the Order had
already spread from the mother-house of San Gio-
vanni in Floris, and had established itself in several
other monasteries.

Joachim regarded himself as inspired and his
writings as divinely revealed. Of these, that which
attracted most attention in his own day was his
tract on the nature of the Trinity, in which he op-
posed the commonly received view, that of Peter
Lombard. This brought him under the suspicion of
heresy. In 1200, however, he declared himself a true
Catholic and submitted all his writings to papal ex-
amination. He was given a certificate of orthodoxy,
which served him well through the remainder of
his life. But at the Lateran Council in 1215 his
views were condemned; though this condemnation
was reversed five years later, through a successful
appeal by his followers to the Pope, and by a bull
declaring him a good Catholic and forbidding de-
nunciation of his Order.

The most important of his genuine works were
three —“Concordia utriusque Testamenti,” which
was the only one published during his life; ““Deca-
chordon, sive Psaltertum decem Cordarum,” and
his “Expositio in Apocalypsin.” His reputation,
however, as a prophet was due rather to spurious
writings composed after his death and assigned to
him. Of these there were many, for they served the
purpose of an important part of the Franciscan

JOACHIM OF FLORIS 65

Order. After the death of St. Francis, in 1226, a
movement of protest arose in the Order against the
literal interpretation of the Rule in regard to pov-
erty. On the one hand the Spirituals, as they came
to be called, insisted that the prescriptions of their
founder must be rigidly observed. No property
whatever must be owned by the monks. In one of
the monasteries a novice had with difficulty learned
to read, and had obtained from his immediate su-
perior permission to own a psalter. But though he
found great joy in this, his conscience troubled him
as to what Francis himself would say to it. So when
the saint came soon after on a visit to the monas-
tery, the novice approached and said to him that he
did not wish to keep his beloved psalter without the
knowledge of the Head of the Order. Francis put him
off with some remarks on the vanity of human glory.
But several days afterward the monk returned to
the charge. Francis turned on him and said: “When
you have got your psalter, you will want a breviary;
and when you have got your breviary, you ’Il sit in
a stall like a great prelate and order one of your
companions, ‘Bring me my breviary.’” Then, taking
some ashes from the hearth Francis sprinkled them
on the novice’s head, saying, “There’s your bre-
viary! There ’s your breviary!”’

On the other hand, the other party in the Order,
the Conventuals, declared that for living in the
world some conformity to its ways must be allowed;

66 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

monasteries at least, if not individuals, must be per-
mitted to acquire property. Against this laxity the
Spirituals brought forward the name of the sainted
Abbot of Floris, pointing out that he had not only
denounced the worldliness of his time, but had fore-
told the near approach of the end of the present
and the beginning of a new era. It was therefore, as
Elisha said to Gehazi, no time to receive money and
to receive garments and olive-yards and vineyards
and sheep and oxen and man-servants and maid-
servants. The boldness of their denunciations of
worldliness in high places shows how great the evil
had become, not only in their Order, but in the
Church. Those who were zealous in combatting
these evils found a potent authority in the works of
Abbot Joachim. Many books were issued purporting
to be by him, denouncing the laxity of the times in
general and of the Franciscan Order in particular,
and even professing to point to Francis before his
birth as the one who would inaugurate the new and
saving era.

The thirteenth century was marked by a renais-
sance of the human spirit almost as great as that of
the sixteenth century. Youth always contains con-
tradictory characteristics existing side by side. So
this tumultuous thirteenth century, while religion
was the centre of its thought and life, was full of un-
questioning faith and the most daring speculation,
of subordination to authority and the mystic’s self-

JOACHIM OF FLORIS 67

sufficiency, of distrust of human reason and bold
philosophy, of partisan devotion to the Church and
to orthodoxy and of fearless attacks on dogma and
ecclesiasticism. And the critical attitude existed not
so much outside the Church as within it. Public
opinion outside the Church had hardly come into
existence, and if it had, there was little non-eccle-
siastical literature to be its expression. But within
the Church men were thinking widely and keenly
and publishing their thoughts; and the fact which
impressed many of the most earnest thinkers was
the difference between the Church of their own day,
and the Church as established by Christ. To them
the contrast was startling. What they saw was a
Church — so they declared — wholly given over to
worldliness, to sensuality, lust, avarice, greed, indo-
lence, neglect of its high calling. The bitterness of
their denunciations of the Church and its dignitaries
could hardly be exaggerated. The Church had made
the world a hell. Rome was Babylon; she was the
Scarlet Woman of the Apocalypse, the barren fig-
tree which Christ cursed. The Pope was Antichrist
and the cardinals and prelates were his members.
The Curia was the most venal and extortionate of all
courts. All orders in the Church were corrupt; the
sheep were neglected and handed over to wolves.
The age-long rival of the Church, the Empire, was
hailed as the agent of God for punishing the Church
by overthrowing its pride.

68 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

It must be constantly borne in mind that these
bitter denunciations were uttered, not by outsiders,
but by those who were, until they were driven
out, children of the Church. Joachim, Amaury de
Béne, Gherardo, Ghiscolo, John of Parma, Peter
Waldo, Jacopone da Tode, Arnaldo de Vilanova, were
all loyal sons of the Church, as were later Jérome of
Prague, Huss, Gansfort, Wiclif, and Luther. It is
this fact that gives special weight to their criticisms.
Yet their earnest efforts after reform were sternly
repressed by the Church and its servant the Inqui-
sition, and the old conditions in Church and State
remained substantially unchanged for three hundred
years more, until the Renaissance and its sister, the
Reformation, burst upon the world in the sixteenth
century.

The opinions of Joachim on which the revolu-
tionary assertions attributed to him were founded,
and for which he has in subsequent times been
chiefly known, were what might be called his phi-
losophy of history. It has been the endeavor of
earnest souls in every age to study the past in order
to find its meaning, the part it has performed in the
divine purpose for the world, and so to throw light
upon the future. This study has varied from an at-
tempt to wrest the secrets of the future from cer-
tain biblical texts to the discovery of a divine plan
of evolution, of which past and future are orderly
stages. Joachim declares that history must have the

JOACHIM OF FLORIS 69

same basis as God, and since He is triune, history
must be threefold. The course of the world falls,
therefore, into three eras. The first is that of God
the Father, extending from the creation of the
world to the birth of Jesus Christ. This was char-
acterized by law, by force, by fear, by obedience,
by the acquisition of knowledge. These were the
foundation-stones of all religion. Next came the era
of God the Son, extending from the birth of Christ
to the time of Joachim himself. In this the chief
characteristic was the worship of a historic being,
radiating from its spiritual centre, love, and in this
worship organization and ritual had a prominent
part. This was to be followed by an era of the
Spirit, in which the soul would not so much as bow
before the Almighty Creator seated in the heavens,
or look back through the centuries to a historic
being to whom to adjust itself, but an era which, by
direct and intimate communion with God, would be
one with Him in will, in purpose, in joy, and in pro-
found peace.

The two distinguishing characteristics of mysti-
cism are the conviction that human and divine are
opposed to each other, so that the particular must
cease in order that the universal may prevail; and
secondly, a sense of the immediacy of the presence
of God. The former characteristic gave rise to asceti-
cism, with its ill-treatment of the flesh; the latter
to the retreat of the soul within itself and the in-

70 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

communicableness of its experiences. Joachim was
the first in medieval times to set forth these two

characteristics clearly and conjointly, and he may
therefore be regarded as the founder of modern mys-
ticism. Many sects arose claiming this immediacy of
relation to God and drawing therefrom the logical
conclusion that there was consequently no-need of
priestly mediation. The Church was therefore, in
modern phrase, a luxury, not a necessity. Such dan-
gerous doctrine could not of course be tolerated by
the ecclesiastical authorities, and merciless persecu-
tions, such as that of the Albigenses, were carried
on against the heretics.

Joachim, like all other devout persons of his time,
had no doubt that all important events of the world
were predicted in the Scriptures. He therefore set
himself to the task, in which so many pious souls,
even to our own day, have so pathetically and piti-
fully spent their hopeless efforts, of endeavoring to
make the mysterious numbers of the Book of the
Revelation reveal the secrets of a still distant future.
From these and other parts of the Bible, Joachim de-
duced that the era of Jesus Christ was to last forty-
two generations, which, estimating a generation at
thirty years, would bring the end in 1260 years from
the birth of Christ. The beginning of the end of this
second era had, it is true, been in the seed planted by
St. Benedict in the sixth century, when he founded
monasticism in the West. But that was only an

JOACHIM OF FLORIS _ 71

adumbration, a promise of what was to come. In the
year 1260 the era of the Spirit would begin, peace
would reign throughout the world, quiet contem-
plation — the height of monastic desire — would
prevail, all men would be friends, and, since the pre-
ceding eras had been as winter and spring, this would
be the full glorious summer of the soul.

In the twelfth century this thought of the domi-
nance of the Holy Spirit was more or less in the air.
It found expression in a manner strikingly like that
of Joachim in Amaury de Béne. He was born in a
little village near Chartres towards the end of the
twelfth century, became a professor of philosophy,
and died in 1207. He held that primitive matter was
simple, having neither quantity nor quality. God
also was by nature simple; but as there could not be
two independent simple beings, God and matter
must be one and the same. Anticipating the modern
theory of the continual movement of atoms, he
maintained that matter was in continual motion.
This would ultimately result in the absorption of
the Universe in God. But before that, the vicissitudes
of nature would have divided the history of the
world into three eras, like those just mentioned, cor-
responding to the three Persons of the Trinity; the
Mosaic period being that of God the Father, the
Gospel period, that of God the Son, to be succeeded
by that of the Holy Spirit. In the second era every
one might be regarded as a member of Christ, since

42 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

his body was in everything as well as in the sacra-
mental bread. All too were, or at least were capable
of being, inspired; God spoke through Ovid as well
as through St. Augustine. The grace of the Holy
Spirit was sufficient for salvation without any further
agency. There was no resurrection of the body other
than the final absorption of all things into the primi-
tive matter.

The three world-eras in the systems of Amaury
and Joachim are at once noticeable; in the rest of
their systems they differed. Joachim would have
shrunk from Amaury’s pantheism, and Amaury had
little interest in Joachim’s apocalyptic speculations.
The question of course arises whether either bor-
rowed from the other. It is almost certain that they
never met, for Joachim was never in France nor was
Amaury ever in Italy. The latter died young, of
chagrin, it is said, at having been obliged to abjure
his opinions; the former when he died was over
seventy. It is not likely therefore that the older man
was influenced by the younger; it is not unlikely
that the younger was influenced by the older, for
Joachim’s opinions and books were widely spread
before his death. Amaury’s pantheism was main-
tained by one of his disciples, Ortlieb of Strasburg,
whose followers, “Ortlibenses” or “Brethren of the
Free Spirit,” as they called themselves, had an in-
fluence on German mysticism. But Amaury’s fol-
lowing was far less extensive and important than

JOACHIM OF FLORIS 73

that of Joachim, who was an inspirer of the orthodox
and the father of heresies for more than a century.

The assurance of the glorious reign of the Spirit
sank deep into the hearts of many who, like Simeon
and Anna, were waiting for the consolation of Israel.
Suddenly, in the year 1254, there appeared in Paris
a book called “Liber introductorius in Evangelium
eeternum,”’ taking its title from a passage in the Book
of the Revelation: “I saw another angel fly in the
midst of heaven, having the everlasting gospel to
preach unto them that dwell on the earth and to every
nation and kindred and tongue and people.” ! This
book consisted of the three undoubted writings of
Joachim, together with explanatory and amplifying
glosses and a lengthy Introduction, in which Joa-
chim’s views are given daring and unsparing devel-
opment. The great popular success which the book
at once obtained shows how wide-spread among all
classes were the opinions of the author. That these
were indeed daring, the following extracts may show.
In the coming era, it was asserted, there will be no
priests, and going barefoot, as was prescribed by the
Rule of Francis, will not be imperative for monks.
The life of action had previously ruled the world;
henceforth there would be only the superior condi-
tion, the life of contemplation. The world therefore
would become a vast monastery. The Pope has
knowledge of the literal sense only of the Scriptures;

1 Rey., xiv, 6.

74 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

knowledge of the true spiritual sense is not given to
him. If he undertakes to decide the spiritual sense,
his judgment is rash, and it is not necessary to take
account of it. Spiritual men are not bound to obey
the Roman Church or to acquiesce in its decisions
in matters of God. The Greeks have done well in
separating from the Roman Church, for they walk
more according to the spirit and are nearer salva-
tion. The Holy Spirit will save the Greeks; Jesus
Christ will attend to the salvation of the Latins;
while God the Father will watch over the Jews and
will save them from their enemies without their
abandonment of Judaism. The era of the Father was
characterized by three great men with twelve com-
panions — Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and the Twelve
Patriarchs. The era of the Son had Zacharias, John
the Baptist, with Jesus and the Twelve Apostles.
The era of the Spirit has, as described in the Apoca-
lypse, the man clothed with linen — Joachim; the
angel with the sharp sickle — perhaps St. Dominic;
and the angel with the sign of the living God — St.
Francis, who had had his dozen of apostles. With
the coming of the Everlasting Gospel the gospel of
Jesus Christ had lost its value, for both Old and
New Testaments are abrogated. As the Old Testa-
ment was the book of the first era and the New Tes-
tament that of the second era, so the Everlasting
Gospel would be the book of the third era. The com-
ing of that era will be preceded by a reign of evil

JOACHIM OF FLORIS 75

under a false and worldly pope, who will bring his
courtesans and his horses into the very churches.
The Church of Rome was declared to be Babylon the
haughty, and the abuse of her wealth and temporal
power was denounced in terms as bitter as the ex-
tremest reformer might use.

That the publication of these views received so
ready and extensive a welcome shows how wide-
spread was the conviction that the established
Christianity was a failure. The author of the book
was commonly believed to be John of Parma, the
General of the Franciscan Order. He was too highly
placed, however, and the Order was too popular, to
make it wise to attack him directly on the ground
of such authorship. But after he had been induced
to resign his position in the Order, he was brought to
trial and condemned on the ground of sympathy in
general with Joachitism, and was allowed to choose
a place of exile. He died in 1289, having acquired
the reputation of sainthood, and soon became the
agent of many miracles and an object of reverence,
so that in 1777 he was beatified in spite of objections
still clinging to him as the supposed author of ‘“The
Introduction to the Everlasting Gospel.” The real
author, however, was probably a Franciscan monk,
Gherardo da Borgo San Donnino.! He was an ardent

1 The authorship, however, has been, even in modern times, di-
versely assigned. It is assigned to John of Parma, by Rousselot (His-
toire del Evangile Eternel, p. 134); to Gherardo by Renan (Nouvelles
Etudes da’ Histoire religieuse, p. 273); and to him also by Henry C.
Lea (4 History of the Inquisition of the Middle Ages, iii, 22).

76 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

Joachite, who in 1250, on account of his learning,
was made a professor of theology in the University
of Paris. Here he devoted himself to the study of
apocalyptics, and here he was when “The Introduc-
tion to the Everlasting Gospel” appeared. His
known views and his intimacy with John of Parma
brought him under suspicion. But the book was so
dangerous and subversive of the whole established
order of things and yet so popular, that it was con-
sidered unsafe to give it even the publicity of open
refutation. It must be passed over, and allowed to
fall into silence as soon as possible. Those who were
responsible for it, however, or who sympathized with
it, could be brought to trial on other grounds. Gher-
ardo was therefore tried as an upholder of Joachim’s
views on the Trinity. He was a man of learning,
modesty, lovableness, and courage. But his condem-
nation was a foregone conclusion. If he had not been
a Franciscan, he would have gone to the stake. He
went instead to chains and a dungeon, bread and
water, which he managed to endure for eighteen
years, when he died in prison without having ever
recanted a single one of his cherished beliefs.

At first, as has been said, it was thought best to
oppose “The Everlasting Gospel” by silence. But
soon refutations began to be published, and at last
the Bishop of Paris sent to Pope Alexander IV for a
definite pronouncement on the book. He appointed
a commission to examine the matter, which was

JOACHIM OF FLORIS 7

speedily done, and in July, 1255, the book was for-
mally condemned. Its influence, however, continued
greater in southern France and elsewhere than in
Italy. It gave comforting support to the Albigenses,
the Brethren of the Free Spirit, the Beghards, with
many smaller sects, and colored as well the outlook
of the Cathari, that widely extended Manichean
movement which, to the excited mind of the Church,
seemed spread like a poisonous malaria, covering a
multitude of sinful ills, and which deserves a mo-
ment’s description.

In 276 a.p. there had been crucified in Persia a
man, Mani, whose doctrines were founded on the
fundamental principle of Zoroastrianism —that the
world is governed by two conflicting powers, good and
evil. Mani identified good with the spirit or will,
and evil with the flesh, with matter. To those who
were oppressed with the burden of the world or with
individual sufferings, this seemed a comforting ex-
planation. The world was not a mere confusion with-
out purpose, but a great battle was going on, in
which one could lend a hand to either side, and his
alliance would be rewarded hereafter if not here.
The readiest way to enlist in the fight for good was
to keep the flesh under, and therefore to crush
natural desires and subdue one’s own body. The
severer the asceticism, the greater was the merit.
As the world is material, its creator must have been
the god of matter, Satan, and as the Old Testament

78 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

declares the creator to have been Jehovah, He and
Satan must be the same. Jesus Christ was the true
object of worship; and as the soul might and should
have direct communication with him, there was no
need of priest, pope, or ritual. Most of the smaller
sects, of which Cathari came to be the generic name,
had, it is true, ritual of a simple sort, but it was not
regarded as of primary importance. They were anti-
ecclesiastical, and the Church, of course, gave them
back their attitude and persecuted them as here-
tics. Abandonment of all that could be regarded as
worldliness, abstinence from all flesh-food,! the pro-
hibition of marriage (said the stricter sort), or at
least its rigid limitation (said the less strict) — these
were foundation principles which were sufficiently
attractive to draw thousands throughout the cen-
turies into sects of different names, all characterized
by unflinching adherence to their special beliefs
and a cheerful readiness to face persecution and
death.

Such were the Cathari, or Patarins, as they were
called in Italy. The most outrageous stories about
them were circulated and believed by the unin-
formed. But those who had the best means of ac-
quiring information, the inquisitors before whom the
Cathari were brought, uniformly admitted that such
tales had no foundation in fact. St. Bernard, their
uncompromising enemy, says: “If you interrogate

1 Though by a curious exception fish was allowed.

JOACHIM OF FLORIS 79

them, nothing can be more Christian; as to their
conversation, nothing less reprehensible, and what
they speak they prove by deeds. As for the morals
of the heretic, he cheats no one, he oppresses no one,
he strikes no one. His cheeks are pale with fasting, he
eats not the bread of idleness, his hands labor for
his livelihood.” The pallor which St. Bernard notes
came to be regarded as convincing proof of Cathar-
ism, and there were zealous inquisitors who sent to
the stake victims who were proved to be Cathari
solely by the pallor of their skins.

Millennarianism, the anticipation of a speedy
coming of the kingdom of heaven on earth, and mys-
ticism, the claim to immediate and overruling rela-
tionship with God, have always had antinomianism
as their logical attendant. Why should one trouble
one’s self with setting things to rights here or ob-
serving man-made laws with however good an aim,
when the whole scheme of things will be shortly
overturned and a new glorious order will prevail?
Indeed, the worse things are the better; for as long
as the present order is not so very bad, God may
allow it to continue; therefore make it worse, so that
He may be induced to interfere as soon as possible.
This in political terms is the argument of the Red
International — revolution is the necessary prelude

1 “Audierat enim eos solo pallore notare hereticos, quasi quos

pallere constaret, haereticos esse certum esset.” Gesta episcoporum
Leodiensium; quoted in Renan’s Nouvelles Etudes d’ Histoire religieuse,

p> 313-

80 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

to the establishment of the true order. Here in
America there are earnestly religious persons who
oppose all humanitarian efforts and benevolent
schemes for the uplifting of the world on the ground
that they do not want the world bettered; they want
it to go from bad to worse, in order that Christ may
the sooner come to redeem it. St. Paul assured his
Thessalonian converts that Jesus would descend
from heaven with shouting and the voice of the arch-
angel and the trump of God; that the faithful would
then arise, and with them those who were still alive
would be caught up into the clouds to meet the Lord
in the air and be there forever with him, and that
this might take place any day. After this disturbing
assurance had had its natural result in upheaving
the ordinary courses of life, he was obliged to write
a second letter to calm the disturbance he had cre-
ated, warning his converts not to be upset by what
he had said, but to check disorder and go on with
their daily occupations. Yet even he declares that
before these things come to pass there will be a
great outbreak of evil upon earth.1 Many an ardent.
reformer has been ruined by his own logic or by that
of the Left Wing of his party, who have insisted on
dragging the millennium in with ropes, regardless of
the confusion wrought. So Luther was embarrassed
by the Zwickau prophets and the Anabaptists of
Minster, and so France found herself seriously hin-

1 1 Thess., iv, 13; 2 Thess., ii.

JOACHIM OF FLORIS 81

dered in establishing herself after the War of 1870
by the Paris Commune.

The “Liber introductorius in Evangelium eeter-
num’ was soon suppressed, but its influence increased
as the fateful year 1260 approached, in which, ac-
cording to the prophecy of Joachim, the new era of
the Spirit would be established. Prophecy in the form
of prediction has always been a favorite occupation
of those who had little critical judgment but much
reliance on authority. Trust in prophecies as to
future happenings has held much the same place as
trust in proverbs for direction in the affairs of life.
The Sibylline Books exercised a profound influence
for centuries. The author of the Dies Irae gives to
the Sibyl an authority and inspiration equal to that
of David the Psalmist:

Solvet saeclum in favilla,

Teste David cum Sibylla.
The claims of Joan of Arc were tested by comparison
with the prophecies of Merlin. Wherever there was
an ardent millennarian, the books of Daniel and the
Revelation seemed to offer a sure and easy entrance
into the events of the future by the mere use of
mathematics and logic. Prophecy was a safety valve
for minds which were disturbed by the condition of
things; it permitted freedom of speech within the
Church. The prophets in all ages have rarely been
inhabitants of cities, where the full tide of human
life appears more or less in perspective, but have

82 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

been dwellers in the wilderness or the desert, where
undisturbed meditation has led to concentration of
interest on some one theme till it subordinated to
itself all others. So the prophet has been a man of
one idea, and this has been the source of his inspira-
tion as an arousing voice, but of his weakness for
organization and action. Joachim, remote in Floris,
was an idealist of this sort. He developed his scheme
of reform for the evils of the world, which were real
enough, but which he contemplated mainly from a
distance. He made no attempt to carry the scheme
into effect — if indeed he could have done so, since
the date of its full inauguration was still in the
future. But so long as he was merely a voice crying
in the wilderness, the Church did not mind him. It
smelled, it is true, danger in him; but the Church
then as always cared little for opinion so long as it
did not attempt to pass into action. He died in the
odor of orthodoxy, which he always stoutly main-
tained was his right. Yet he provided an arsenal of
weapons for others to use against the Church, and
was the father of heresies which the Church spent
a century in putting down. The claim to the pos-
session of the Holy Spirit is fatal to ecclesiasticism.
If the guide is within, what need is there of external
authority? Joachim founded his system on the Trin-
ity. But Olivists, Fraticelli, Albigenses, and mystics
of all names who reaped the harvest of the seed he
sowed, threw aside all care for orthodox doctrine and
went to the furthest extremes of individualism. The

JOACHIM OF FLORIS 83

mystic, in spite of Santa Teresa and a few like her,
has always tended to disregard all the world except
God and himself and to become himself absorbed in
God. The Church has therefore left mystics undis-
turbed so long as they have created no disturbance;
but when they have published their doctrines or or-
ganized a following, has condemned them, with Huss
and Molinos, to the stake or the prisons of the In-
quisition.

The work of Joachim was, therefore, in reality a
poem, like the Dies Irae of Thomas of Celano in the
next generation. It was not a programme, as it was
taken to be by Gherardo da Borgo and others who
proclaimed the “Evangelium sternum.” When it
was found that, as a programme, it did not fit the
events of the time, and especially when the fateful
year 1260 had come and gone and, as was the com-
plaint of those who were disappointed at the non-
appearance of Christ, all things continued as they
were from the beginning of creation, then the faith
of many began to be shaken. It was remembered that
Joachim’s previous prophecies had not always been
fulfilled; for he had predicted that Saladin would
lose Jerusalem seven years after having taken it, but
there he still sat in possession. It is true that St.
Bernard had predicted that the second Crusade
would be successful, though it had turned out a fail-
ure; but then he was a saint and, even more im-
portant, undoubtedly orthodox. But while nothing

84. HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

could shake the faith of the ardent believers in the
coming of the kingdom of the Spirit, those who cared
more for its material than its spiritual benefits began
to lose faith'and withdraw from a connection which
was growing dangerous.

Such was the Franciscan Fra Salimbene, He was
born at Parma in 1221, and when he was sixteen
years old entered the Order of St. Francis in spite
of the violent opposition of his father. It may be
questioned whether this step was prompted solely
by devotion to religion. Salimbene was all his life
eager to be in the midst of things, and in 1237 Fran-
ciscanism was distinctly the thing. The Order was
having a marvellous success. By the middle of the
century it had 8000 monasteries, with 200,000
monks. Discipline was not uniform, and a monk
need by no means look forward to spending all his
days in one house. Salimbene was transferred from
one monastery to another; he was sent on missions
and various ecclesiastical errands; he was apparently
a favorite with the authorities and was given per-
mission at times to travel on his own account. He
made good use of his opportunities. Wherever any-
thing interesting was going on, he almost always
managed to be there. He got invited to the tables of
the great and was a favorite with ladies. He had the
insatiable curiosity and the close observation char-
acteristic of the Renaissance. He had also its mixture
of opposing traits; he was pleasingly worldly, yet

JOACHIM OF FLORIS 85

truly religious; a great gossip, yet knowing when to
keep his mouth shut; devoted to the gay spectacle of
life around him, but devoted to his Order; a chronicler
of trivial incidents from here, there, and everywhere,
and so a historian of his century; adiner-out, a hearty
eater, an ample drinker, fond of a decorous flirtation,
thoroughly a man of the world, and yet thoroughly
an ecclesiastic with some genuine religion thrown in.
The world was a great show and he was immensely
interested in being a spectator. If he had been a
courtier of the seventeenth century and had lived
in England, his name would have been Samuel
Pepys. Life was sweet to him, and toward the end
of it and of the century he wrote in his “Chronicle,”

Heu! heu! mundi vita,

Quare me dilectas ita?

Cum non possis mecum stare,
Quid me cogis te amare?

It was natural enough that he should have be-
come an adherent of Joachitism when it was at-
tracting the attention of the ecclesiastical world, and
quite as natural that after 1260 he should have lost
faith in it. When he met his old friend Gherardo da
Borgo San Donnino, who was on his way to Paris to
be condemned to perpetual imprisonment for his
sturdy adherence to Joachitism, Salimbene declined
to be convinced by Gherardo’s arguments and went
his way among the courtiers and ladies and brethren
of his Order. Some years after the “Introductorium
in Evangelium eternum” had been condemned, Sal-

86 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

imbene saw a copy of it in a convent. Knowing that
he had been considered a Joachite, the head of the
convent asked him his opinion of the book. But
Salimbene, fearing some snare, declared that it
should be burned at once, which was done.!

The influence of Joachitism was felt in the latter
half of the thirteenth century in the rise of many
petty sects, — Apostoli, Crociati, Gaudenti, Flagel-
lanti, Saccati, Militi di Gesu Christo, — some of
which were soon persecuted out of existence, while
some died peacefully of inanition. But upon the more
important sects, such as the Cathari, the Albigenses,
the Waldenses, its influence, as has been said, was
strong. Not that this was always a direct influence
— often it was indirect. Joachitism laid foundation
thoughts which became the premises necessitating
conclusions inimical to the system of the Church.
For it seemed to regard the Christianity of its day
as a temporary phase of religion, which would give
way to a different stage, in which the Church would
yield place to a new and higher organization. To
maintain this was of course heresy. Sometimes a
breach between the ecclesiastical authorities and the
individual has been averted by the aid of powerful
friends, as later in the case of Wiclif, or by conces-
sions on both sides, as with Erasmus. But in the
main the persecutions for heresy in the thirteenth

*“Dimisi totaliter istam doctrinam et dispono noncredere nisiquae
videro.” Salimbene, Chrom., p. 131.

JOACHIM OF FLORIS 87

and fourteenth centuries were successful in stamp-
ing it out or driving it underground. They by no
means abolished it, as the Reformation of the six-
teenth century showed.

The wonder is that Protestantism did not appear
two or three centuries earlier. For the Middle Ages
were not at all, as is sometimes supposed, ages of
unquestioning faith and submission to the Church.
The most daring speculations and the bitterest de-
nunciations of the Church were openly published.
But the uprise of the human spirit in the Renais-
sance weakened the fighting forces upon which the
Church had relied. It was no longer possible to as-
sume in the popular mind a complete conviction
that the Church had full control of the destinies of
the future life, or that its decisions for this life were
infallible, or that its priests and prelates consti-
tuted a holy caste. These foundations had by the
sixteenth century been shaken, and in spite of the
organized forces of Loyola, the old conditions could
not be reéstablished. Although the world did not
feel the impress of Francis Bacon’s revolutionary
method of thought until the early part of the next
century, something of the scientific spirit was in the
air in the sixteenth century, and made the old ways
of deductive reasoning less comfortable. It is sur-
prising to a modern mind, trained to ask first of all,
“What is the fact?” to note the undemonstrated
character of the bases assumed, on which down to

88 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

recent times systems have been built. Joachim was
confident that there must be three eras in history
because there were three Persons in the Godhead.
Heretics had a high standard of morality; therefore
purity of morals was a sign of heresy.

Symbolism was readily adjustable to the exigences
of all occasions; thus Joachim makes Elizabeth, the
mother of John the Baptist, represent the Jewish
Synagogue; but a little later he needs a representa-
tive of the Church of the second era, that of Christ,
and behold, Elizabeth becomes such. In his conver-
sation with Richard Coeur de Lion, Joachim ex-
pressed his belief that Antichrist was already born.
But his attention was called to the statement in the
Book of the Revelation that Satan would be bound
for a thousand years before the final battle against
Gog and Magog. This, however, did not disturb
Joachim’s exegesis. The thousand years, he ex-
plained, did not mean a thousand, but “thousand”
was mentioned because “millennarius numerus per-
fectissimus est et maximam plentitudinem designat
annorum.” Joachim was neither the first nor the
last to bend exegesis to suit the occasion. He was
sweet-natured and begged to have a kindly hand

1 About 1220 a clerk of Spire, whose austerity subsequently led
him to join the Franciscans, was saved only by the interposition of
Conrad, afterwards Bishop of Hildesheim, from being burned as a
heretic because his preaching led certain women to lay aside their

vanities of apparel and behave with humility. Henry C. Lea, History
of the Inquisition, 1, 87.

JOACHIM OF FLORIS 89

extended to him if in any of his writings he had
erred.! He has the dignity which looks on death
calmly and welcomes it: “Not only is death not to
be feared, but one is on all accounts to hasten
toward it.” ?

The great claim of Joachim, however, to be re-
membered is that he hit upon the fact; that which
was the chief characteristic of his system is in reality
the centre and essence of religion — the dominance
of the spirit. When we spell Spirit with a capital and
put a definite article before it, we limit the range of
its thought by relegating it to theology or eschatol-
ogy. But that spirit is the central power in person-
ality, binding man to man and man to God, is what
the world is slowly but with increasing conviction
coming to perceive. Knowledge of the facts of the
world, even the recognition of a personal power be-
hind these facts, a Creator, may be independent of
any attitude of soul, whether attraction or repulsion.
There need necessarily be no outgoing of welcome on
the part of the individual toward the universe, and
therefore no essential unity with it, no allegiance
toward its inmost law. One in such a condition is,
in Joachim’s phrase, living in the era of God the
Father; it is primitive motives which dominate him.

1 “Tta vos mihi manum porrigatis, quatenus si in hoc aut aliis aut
opusculis meis erravi sicut homo.”

2 “Non solum mors fugienda non est, verum etiam ad eam modis
omnibus accelerandum est.”

go HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

But one may recognize God as expressed not only
in the material world which He has created, but in
humanity; preéminently in humanity in its highest
development. God once embodied in a human being
as much of Himself as humanity is capable of ex-
pressing. This historic incarnation is, therefore, a
centre to which all succeeding ages must look back.
It becomes the object of the world’s worship, which
must necessarily be developed through organiza-
tions and institutions and ritual and ecclesiasticism.
The Church becomes the protective shell enclosing
its pearl, the worship of Jesus. That which espe-
cially differentiates this epoch from the preceding is
that it involves a motion and therefore an attitude
of soul. The soul looks toward the central figure of
the ages with wonder, reverence, worship, affection,
the desire for imitation. One gives himself. This
may bring the soul into close intimacy with Christ.
Yet, curiously enough, it was not the character of
Jesus or his teachings that had been chiefly dwelt
upon since his death, so much as his position, his
relation to God as Son, agent, mediator, to man as
intercessor, judge, founder of a Church. This tended
to magnify his official position and obscure personal
relationship with him. In any case, the soul which
was animated by the moving force of this era was
faced toward the past, as are those to-day whose
motto is “Back to Jesus!”

It was not only the corruption of the Church that

JOACHIM OF FLORIS gi

made Joachim and other devout souls of his day de-
clare that a new era must come in; it was their con-
viction that there was a closer relation to Christ
than that of worshipping him as a historic being.
Such a relation would consist not so much in believ-
ing his words or obeying his commands as in being
filled with his spirit. The attitude which Jesus held
toward men and toward God was the very centre of
his being, and it could become the centre of every
man’s being as well. When the theologians inter-
preted Jesus’ saying, “I and my Father are one,” as
referring to a metaphysical unity, they emptied it of
practical value; but when understood as a unity of
will, of affections, of moral judgment, it becomes
illuminative and potent. It is a reality to-day for
many an experienced Christian. For years he has
practised the ordinances of religion — church-going,
Bible-reading, daily devotions. But in time they
cease to feed to the full his soul. He practises them
less because he cries out, “My soul is athirst for
God, for the living God.” He turns inward and up-
ward; his thoughts fly Godward continually. The
two walk together in the way because they are
agreed. It is not so much that he has abandoned
the first and second eras as that they have done
their educative work and led him on into the third
era. They are with him still, just as the alphabet
and the multiplication table are the unconscious
foundations of his thinking. The higher stages do not

92 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

supersede the lower; they presuppose them. The
three stages symbolized by Joachim’s three eras
must be present in every full Christian life. It 1s
the joy of young lovers to say to each other, “I
love you!” It is the joy of old lovers to have the
consciousness of mutual love pass so fully into un-
consciousnesss that it has become part of the atmo-
sphere they breathe, on which they reckon without
so much as a reassuring glance. So when the soul
has long known and lived with God, He has become
an inseparable part of its life. They are one in the
unity of the spirit. A pious German cobbler of old
time used to offer before going to bed his daily and
only prayer: “All is as ever, Lord, between Thee
and me!”

It was the great discovery of the first Day of Pen-
tecost that the spirit of Jesus was in reality Jesus
himself; so that his disciples need not go forth feeling
bereaved of their Master, but might have the con-
viction that for all time, wherever there was his
spirit, Jesus, their loved Master, was himself with
them. They need not think, because they could not
see him, that they were without him. The Lord and
the Spirit were one.! This gave new life to their de-
pressed hearts, and the Christian Church came into
being, founded on a living Christ. It has been this
discovery that has brought comfort to many a

1 TT Cor., iit, 17.

JOACHIM OF FLORIS 93

mourning heart, which has turned from gazing into
an open grave with the consoling assurance, “He is
not here; he is risen;” since living in the spirit of
the dear one who has gone is in reality living still
with him. It was this which in the early Church made
the possession of the Spirit the test of a Christian.
When St. Paul comes to Ephesus and asks the dis-
ciples he finds there, “Have ye received the Holy
Spirit since ye believed?” and is answered, “We have
not so much as heard whether there be any Holy
Spirit,” he holds up his hands in surprise and amaze-
ment. ‘“‘Unto what then were ye baptized?””! He can-
not conceive how one can be a Christian who has
not the spirit of Christ.

This truth we are to-day coming more fully to
recognize. It is not profession which constitutes a
Christian, not membership in any church, not the
holding of any set of opinions, not even by itself
uprightness of life; it is the possession of the spirit
of Christ. One may have all knowledge and all
power, but without this spirit he will be but as
sounding brass or a tinkling symbol; with it, he may
be poor and ignorant but yet one of the mighty of
the earth. It is the lack of this spirit that breeds
war; and, as Joachim and the present-day statesmen
declare, it is only the coming of a different spirit
that can make and preserve peace.

1 Acts xix, 2, 3.

94 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

The conviction that it is the spirit of Christ that
constitutes a Christian sheds an illuminating judg-
ment on those many characters which regard them-
selves as non-Christians because they do not accept
the historic Jesus, but which yet are moved by his
spirit. They are the representatives of those men
who did wonders in his name, that is, in the spirit
of Christ, who yet did not attach themselves to his
following, and whom he refused to allow his disciples
to reject.! If they are not Christians in the narrow
sense, they are such by the test which he established.
So we find in the modern world many a one who
holds himself aloof from historic religion who yet has
much of love, joy, peace, long-suffering, gentleness,
goodness, faith, meekness, self-control. And these,
St. Paul declares, are the fruit of the spirit. Such
a one Heine claims to be, as he replies to his love’s
fears that he is an unbeliever:

“Auch bezweifl’ ich, dass du glaubest —
Was so rechter Glaube heisst —
Glaubst wohl nicht an Gott der Vater,
An den Sohn und heil’gen Geist.

Ach, mein Kindchen, schon als Knabe,
Als ich sass auf Mutters Schoss,
Glaubte ich an Gott den Vater,

Der da waltet gut und gross.

1 St. Mark ix, 38 ff.

JOACHIM OF FLORIS 95

Als ich grosser wurde, Kindchen,
Noch viel mehr begriff ich schon;
Ich begriff und war verniinftig,
Und ich glaubt’ auch an den Sohn.

Jetzo, da ich ausgewachsen,

Viel gelesen, viel gereist,

Schwillt mein Herz, und ganz von Herzen
Glaub’ ich an den heil’gen Geist.

Tausend Ritter, wohlgewappnet,
Hat der heil’ge Geist erwahlt,
Seinen Willen zu erfiillen;

Und er hat sie muthbeseelt.

Nun, so schau mich an, mein Kindchen,
Kiisse mich, und schaue dreist;

Denn ich selber bin ein solcher

Ritter von dem heil’gen Geist.”

The Hebrew prophets, from Amos to the Seer of
the Apocalypse saw profoundly and truly into the
relations of God and man. When they came, how-
ever, to predict the events in which these relations
would be embodied, they were often quite mistaken.
So the Great Prophet, as Joachim was called in his
day, depicted the kingdom of the spirit in terms
which were narrow, puerile, and impossible. Yet his
vision was true and profound of the march of the
ages, culminating in the supremacy of the spirit of
Jesus in the hearts of men, therefore in their actions,

1H. Heine, Buch der Lieder, “ Berg-Idylle,” 2.

96 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

and therefore in their institutions. The world would
then be independent of external authority, being at
one with God. It was the utopia which the author of
the Book of the Revelation had seen when he be-
held Jerusalem the New coming down in splendor
from heaven where it had always dwelt in ideal, and
becoming established on earth. Neither his dream
nor Joachim’s has yet been fully realized. But out
of such dreams comes ultimately the glorious reality.

Ill

ANGELUS SILESIUS
A SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY MYSTIC

URING the last quarter-century more inves-

tigation than ever before has been going on
into the unconscious activities of the human mind,
or, as the investigators have preferred to call it, the
subconscious mind. This has led, in psychology, to
the study of apparitions and the various forms of
telepathy, and in religion to a revival of Quietism.
Religious bodies as far from Quakerism as the Epis-
copal Church are holding retreats for meditation,
silent prayer, “the practice of the presence of God.”
The exclusion of worldly thought is pointed to as the
means for the opening of the soul to the incoming
of the Divine; and some are following the Mystic
Way through its steps of Purgation, Illumination,
and Ecstasy, to its goal of absorption into God in |
the Unitive Life.

This revived interest at the present time in mys-
ticism is not surprising. For in an age which is de-
voted to efficiency and moved largely by machinery,
when thought is subordinated to action and the
quality most highly prized is power, there will al-
ways be those who turn away in sadness and disgust

98 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

from the rush of effort, and seek to find God by
walking in the garden in the cool of the day; who
adjust themselves to receiving, confident that from
all sides the universe will pour its wealth into them
if they do but furnish capacity for reception. They
turn to those who in the midst of their strenuous
activities are distrustful of any attainment except
through effort, and say,
Think you, ’mid all this mighty sum
Of things forever speaking,

That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?

It was when the might of paganism was asserting
itself under Diocletian against Christianity that
the Fayoum was filled by St. Anthony and his
monks. Meister Eckart, Tauler, and Ruysbroeck
lived in a world busy with petty wars and petty
politics. And it was in 1624, shortly after the begin-
ning of the Thirty Years’ War, that Johann Schef-
fler, afterwards known as Angelus Silesius, was born
in Silesia at Breslau, or perhaps at Glatz. He is
less known than his fourteenth-century predecessors,
or even than his master, Jakob Boehme; but he is
interesting for the completeness with which he rep-
resents the positions of mysticism and for the daring
with which he accepts the conclusions of its logic.
Our busy age may well find a lesson in him. After
reading his “Cherubinischer Wandersmann,” one is
inclined to say, as of The Apocalypse, “Seal not the

ANGELUS SILESIUS 99

sayings of the prophecy of this book, for the time is
at hand.”

- He was a Lutheran by birth and education, and
took to studying medicine at Strasburg, Padua,
Leyden, and Amsterdam, with strong interests also
in theology and poetry. After taking his doctor’s
degree in philosophy and medicine at Padua, he be-
came, in 1649, court physician to the strongly Luth-
eran Duke Sylvius Nimrod at Oels in Wiirtemberg.
He remained here, however, only three years, and
then returned to Breslau. He found the ecclesiastical
atmosphere in both places uncongenial. The early
glow of the Reformation had given place to the
acrimonies and hair-splittings of Protestant scholas-
ticism. The Lutheran was bitter against the Cal-
vinist and the Calvinist against the Lutheran, and
both against the Zwinglian; and the bitterness of all
against one another was often greater than against
their common enemy, Rome. Ever since the Psalm-
ist hesitated to announce the message which had
brought light to his soul through fear that it would
offend the devout, and warned himself — “If I say,
‘I will speak thus,’ behold, I should offend against
the generation of Thy children’”— through all the
ages, the bitterly pious ecclesiastic, narrowly zealous
for his own type of orthodoxy, has been the strongest
agency in turning men away from religion. And men
of this type abounded, both at the duke’s court and
in Silesia. Jakob Boehme, who died in the year in

100 }=HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

which Scheffler was born, had been browbeaten and
silenced for five years by an aggressive clerical
guardian of Protestant orthodoxy in Silesia; and a
half-century later Duke Sylvius’s court preacher fell
foul of the court physician. Protestantism, as Schef-
fler met it, was unlovely. Its emphasis upon doc-
trine, its straining at the gnat of conformity while
swallowing the camel of un-Christlikeness, its sus-
picion of good works, and the coldness with which it
regarded that immediate union with God which its
own son, Boehme, had claimed, all combined with
the unattractiveness of those who were its represen-
tatives to turn Scheffler from it.

There are people of whom we say, “They are good,
but —”; and that “but” is like Pharaoh’s lean kine,
which devoured all the fat kine that were before
them. So it was with those who to Scheffler stood
for Protestantism; and on June 12, 1653, he aban-
doned it and entered the Roman Catholic Church.
He had the zeal of the new convert; he would shake
off the very dust of Protestantism from his feet. And
so he adopted a new name. It had been his growing
interest in mysticism which had helped in bringing
him into his new surroundings. He took, conse-
quently, for a kind of godfather a Spanish mystic of
the sixteenth century, Johannes de Angelis, and bor-
rowing his name, called himself Johannes Angelus.
But as there was a contemporary Protestant doctor
of theology by that name, he could not risk the

ANGELUS SILESIUS IOI

contamination of being confused with him, and he
therefore appended the distinguishing adjective “Si-
lesius,” from the province of his birth, and he was
known thereafter as Johannes Angelus Silesius.

He must previously have gained some distinction;
for in less than a year after his conversion the Aus-
trian Emperor, Frederick III, conferred on him the
title of court physician. It was in this case only a
title, the position carrying no duties and no income,
but giving him the standing of a distinguished per-
son and shielding him from the annoyances which
his ecclesiastical change might involve. For seven
years now he devoted himself to the study of dog-
matics, and to perhaps composing, certainly pub-
lishing, his two chief poetical works. The first,
appearing in 1657, had the title, “Geistreiche Sinn-
und Schlussreime.” This title was changed in the
second edition to “Johannis Angeli Silesii Cheru-
binischer Wandersmann. Geistreiche Sinn- und
Schlussreime zur géttlichen Beschaulichkeit anlei-
tende.”’ A second poem, or collection of poems, which
appeared almost at once, showing that it had been
composed before the publication of the first, was
headed “‘Heilige Seelenlust, oder geistliche Hirten-
lieder der in ihren Jesum verliebten Psyche; ge-
sungen von Johann Angelo Silesio und von Herrn
Georgio Josepho mit ausbiindig schénen Melodien
geziert.””

In 1651 he entered the Franciscan Order and was

102 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

consecrated priest. His prominence in the affairs of
the Church in Breslau led some of his former Protest-
ant associates to circulate scurrilous songs, attacking
him. He shortly afterwards replied in a pamphlet,
in which he ascribed the recent victories of the Turks
to a judgment of God for the secession of the
Protestants from the Church of Rome. The Luth-
eran theologians were naturally not inclined to this
view, and several prominent among them replied;
and so began an unedifying controversy, with all the
polemic heat, the sharpness of tongue and personal
vilification, which the time regarded as proper in
discussion. It is always easier to set a dog barking
than to stop him by the soundest arguments. In
twelve years Scheffler published fifty-five blasts
against the Protestants, bitter as aloes but without
their wholesomeness. One can readily see how the
arm of even so doughty a champion might by that
time have grown weary, and why he gradually grew
tired of making faces. Many of his Catholic friends
too were not altogether pleased at having him as |
their representative. He was persuaded to retire from
active conflict, and was allowed to choose the chief
smooth stones out of the brook with which he had
slain his Philistines and publish them under the
title “Ecclesiologia, bestehend in 39 verschiedenen
auserwahlten Traktatlein.”” He had been a person
of importance in the State as well as the Church;
for in 1664 he had been appointed marshal and

ANGELUS SILESIUS 103

counsellor to the Prince-Bishop of Breslau, a posi-
tion which gave weight to the polemics in which he
was engaged. But the slackening of his polemical
ardor coincided with the death of his friend Sebas-
tian, the Prince-Bishop, and in 1671 he resigned his
offices and retired to the monastery of St. Matthias
in Breslau. Here for six years he was occupied in
editing his works and communing with his soul. He
apparently never saw the opposition between the
two, or felt it strange that one whose ideal was ex-
pressed in the popular hymn,

Ruhe ist das beste Gut
Das mann haben kann,

should find his great interest and chief occupation
in the hot activities of acrimonious polemics.

Just after the publication, in 1677, of his “‘Eccle-
siologia,” the arsenal of his munitions of war, he
died. His conviction that to one spiritually minded
the things of the flesh, including pain, are nothing —

Mensch, bist du Gott getreu, und meinest Ihn allein,
So wird die grésste Noth ein Paradies dir seyn.t
(I, 131.)
this conviction was put to the test by a severe and
painful illness. To him, as to many another Christ-
ian, the process of being unclothed was one in which
t Art thou but true to God, seeking no other gain,

Thou wilt find Paradise even in the sharpest pain.
The numerals refer to the Books of the Cherubinischer Wanders-
mann.

104 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

he groaned, earnestly desiring to be clothed upon.
Yet while one hand remained entangled in earthly
things, the other with its firm grip on heaven was
ever lifting him upward.

I have spoken of his poetry as comprised in two
volumes. He published a third in 1675, entitled
“Johannis Angeli Silesii Beschreibung der.vier letz-
ten Dinge.” It is a vivid portrayal of death, the
Judgment Day, the eternal pains of the damned,
and the eternal joys of the saved, which he hoped
would convert the impenitent. But, like most sul-
phurous whifts of the atmosphere of hell, the flavor
of brimstone repels one from the preacher rather
than from the place, or else is discounted as unreal
and passed by with derision, while the joys ascribed
to heaven are pallid and unattractive to warm-
blooded humanity. There is hardly any kinship be-
tween this attempt to get the accounts of the world
ready for the Day of Judgment, and the “Heilige
Seelenlust” or the “‘Geistreiche Schlussreime.” The
“Cherubinischer Wandersmann” did not travel into
this grim country.

The “‘Heilige Seelenlust,”’ whose extended title I
have already given, is a mild decoction of Solo-
mon’s Song. The love of the soul, or psyche, for
Jesus is set forth in the sensuous, sometimes sensual,
terms of physical passion which have been not un- :
common in minds where ecstasy has followed medi-
tation. Of the two hundred and five poems which

ANGELUS SILESIUS 105

the volume contains, most are to a modern reader
simply dull. The expression of love and longing
rarely rises above the commonplace. Of the five
books into which it is divided, the first three form
an orderly whole. The Saviour is accompanied on
his journey through life from his birth to his ascen-
sion, and the soul exults in union with him here and
hereafter. The other two books, published later and
separately, contain poems on the spiritual life but
unrelated to one another.

The “Heilige Seelenlust” is a mine in which the
compilers of hymn-books have dug. Heinrich Mul-
ler’s “Geistliche Seelenmusik,” which appeared in
1669, only two years after the publication of Schef-
fler’s book, contained thirty-one hymns taken from
it. In the course of the next half-century half
a dozen hymn-books acknowledged their debt to
it, and sometimes the debt was large; as in case of
the “Freylinghausen Gesangbuch,” which included
fifty-two out of Scheffler’s two hundred and five
pieces. The hymnologists of the Pietistic Move-
ment found Scheffler’s ardent commonplaces to their
taste, and borrowed them even more fully. In the
more recent Evangelical hymn-books some still re-
tain their place. Among these are:

Liebe, die du mich zum Bilde (II, 338),
Ich will dich lieben, meine Starke (I, 30),
Mir nach spricht Christus unser Held (V, 580),

Ich danke dir fiir deinen Tod (I, 190),
Jesus ist der schénste Nahm (I, 103).

106 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

Some have been translated into English, or rather
paraphrased; the first of those above mentioned by
Miss Winkworth, beginning,

O Love, who formedst me to wear
The image of Thy Godhead here;

and the second by John Wesley,

Thee will I love, my strength and tower.

Miss Winkworth has also translated

Morgenstern du finstren Nacht (I, 80).
(Morning Star, in darksome night.)

Other translations are the following:
Komm Liebsten komm in deinen Garten (III, 289).
(Make my heart a garden fair. — Miss Cox).

Jesus ist die schénste Nahm (I, 103).
(Jesus is the highest name. — A. T. Russell).

Wo wiltu hin weils Abends ist? (II, 217),
(Where wilt thou go, since night draws near? — A. Crull).

The hymns of Angelus Silesius have kept his name
alive in Germany. But the world there and else-
where has been discovering a weightier ground of
remembrance in his first volume — “‘Geistliche Sinn-
und Schlussreime,” or, as it is commonly called,
from the addition to the title in the second edition,
the “Cherubinischer Wandersmann.” Man, so the
title would indicate, is but a traveller here below,
with no abiding place; but through union with God
he acquires a super-earthly life and lasting peace, like
that of the heaven-inhabiting cherubim. This union
of opposites, the earthly and the heavenly, is the

ANGELUS SILESIUS 107

ground-tone running throughout the poem. Perhaps
it should hardly be called a poem, since that implies
more or less unity. The theme on which he is en-
gaged is so great and manifold that endeavoring to
reduce it to system would be like attempting to
drive one of the beasts of The Revelation, with
seven heads and ten horns, with each head trying
to go its own way. So he lets it take its way, and
gives us here a collection of aphorisms, chiefly coup-
lets in Alexandrine verse, having relation to the
general theme but little to one another. To attempt
therefore to read many of them at a time is like
riding in a jolting cart over a rough road, and is
unwise. They are rather to be treated in the way
our Puritan forefathers took the Bible, when they
bit off a verse or two in the morning and chewed on
them throughout the day. The mastication of Schef-
fler’s verses is not facilitated by beauty of style, for
they are so condensed that they must dispense with
amplifications and embellishments. To compare him
with his immediate predecessors in English poetry:
he has no kinship with the beauty-loving school of
Spenser; he has much in common with the hard-
thinking, close-knit phraseology of the school of
Donne. Moreover, he is not a master of technique;
he is more intent upon matter than manner, and is
often put to bald shifts to subdue his verse. He has
his favorite tags which help him to conquer a re-

> 66%

fractory line: “Mensch, glaube mir,” “ich weiss,”

108 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

“kann ich kihnlich sagen,” “fur und ftir.’ These
often come in handy when he has said his say but
is compelled by the exigence of his metre to fill out
the required number of feet. Many of his verses are
commonplace. Many are commonplace to us be-
cause they were revelations in his day. But there is
in many of them a profundity of insight, a.depth of
feeling, a passion for God, and above all a daring
in boldly claiming the conclusions which the logic
of his theology carries, which make one who has
known him unable to forget him. And occasionally
he stumbles into beauty. There is in these couplets a
kind of fragrant perfume, such as Isaac detected in
his son’s garments: “The smell of my son is as the
smell of a field which the Lord hath blessed.”

His fundamental position is that God is love. But
love means sharing, sharing one’s best, sharing all
one’s best. And one’s best is ever himself. God there-
fore is for ever endeavoring to pour Himself into us,
to give us all of Himself that we are capable of re-
ceiving.

Gott gibet Niemand nichts; Er stehet allen frey,

Dass Er, wo du nur Ihn so willst, ganz deine sey.

21.)*

Gott liebet mich allein; nach mir ist nie aie

Dass Er auch stirbt vor Angst, weil ich Ihm nicht anhange.
(III, 37.)
* God thrusts Himself on none; He stands for all men free.
So that, whate’er thou wilt, He may be unto thee.

? God loves the special Me. Anxious for me He is;
So that He would expire of grief, were I not His.

ANGELUS SILESIUS 109

Such bountifulness on God’s part must result in
endowing the soul with all the amplitude of God’s
own nature.

Ich bin so gross als Gott; Er ist als ich so klein.
Er kann nich iiber mich, ich unter Ihm nicht seyn.
(I, 10.) *

This union with God results in the annihilation of
time and place and makes eternity present.

Nicht du bist in dem Ort; der Ort, der ist in dir.
Wirfst du hinaus, so steht die Ewigkeit schon hier.
(I, 185.) 2
Zeit ist wie Ewigkeit und Ewigkeit wie Zeit,
So du nur selber nicht machst einen Unterscheid.
ayy?
Mensch, wo du deinen Geist schwingst iiber Ort und Zeit,
So kannst du jeden Blick seyn in der Ewigkeit.
(I, 12.) 4

Both heaven and hell are annihilated.

Wo in der Holle nicht kann ohne Hille leben,
Der hat sich noch nicht ganz dem Héchsten iibergeben.

(I, 39.) §
1 God is as small as I; I am as great as He.
He cannot above me, nor I beneath Him be.
2 Thou dwellest not in space, but space, it is in thee.
Cast it out, and already is eternity.
3 Eternity is as time, time as eternity.
If they are otherwise, the difference is in thee.
4 Lift up thy soul o’er time and space. The spirit’s power
Shall give thee even here eternity each hour.
5 He who in hell itself without hel! cannot live,
To his own Best hinself as yet he does not give.

110 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

Mensch, wird das Paradies in dir nicht erstlich seyn,

So glaube mir gewiss, du kommest nimmer drein.

(I, 295.) *

The efficient agent of the Divine judgments is
therefore transferred from without to within the
soul.

Der Himmel ist in dir und auch der Héllen Qual.

Was du erkiest und willst, das hast du iiberall.

(I, 145.)

Was klagst du iiber Gott? -Du selbst verdammest dich.

Er mocht’ es ja nicht thun, das glaube sicherlich.

(I, 137.)

This identification of the Divine judgments with
the inner workings of the soul has become in the last
half-century familiar to us. But it was by no means
familiar to the men of Scheffler’s day. The reign of
law was then viewed as far more limited in range
than since the great rise of scientific knowledge in
the last century. To the thought of the men of the
seventeenth century events not the direct result of
human effort are from the arbitrary will and im-
posing hand of God. He reaches down from the
skies and gives blessings here and punishments
there. He takes this man to heaven and sends that
one to hell, and there is no telling beforehand

* If with thee Paradise exist not first within,

Then, trust me well, thou ne’er wilt come therein.
Heaven is in thee, and also in thee is hell’s pain.

Whate’er thou wilt, whate’er thou choosest, thou dost gain.
§ But why complain of God, when it is thou alone

Canst ever damn thyself? He sentences no one.

ANGELUS SILESIUS T11

what will be the fate of either. Silesius himself, in
his “Sinnliche Beschreibung,” revels in depicting
heaven and hell as localities, and describing their
pleasures and pains as poured upon the soul from
outside itself. This is the conventional method of
religious speech. But into his contemporaries, trained
to look thus to a future state for the assessment of
moral values, Silesius drove a deeper thought when
he proclaimed that the character of the soul not
only determines its status but is its status.

Wie magst du was begehrn? Du selber kannst allein
Der Himmel und die Erd’ und tausend Engel seyn.
(II, 149.) *

Not that hewas the first to make this discovery, for it
was but the development of the Johannine thought,
“This is life eternal — to know Thee, the only true
God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou has sent”;
“This is damnation — that light is come into the
world, and men loved darkness rather than light.”
It was but the consequence of the Pauline thought,
in which Christ not only speaks to the soul, not
only speaks in the soul, but is identical with the
true condition of the soul itself. Silesius, however,
was one of the first to proclaim in modern times that
the soul is itself the agent in establishing automati-
cally what had been regarded as externally imposed
judgments of God.

= Wherefore desirst thou aught? since thou thyself mayst even
Be earth and myriad angels and the very heaven.

112 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

In carrying out to its full range the conclusion
which the logic of the situation authorizes, Angelus
Silesius, like Isaiah, is very bold. If God gives Him-
self to man, then man, in so far, becomes God.
Indeed, Silesius in his joyous flight is not always
particular to put in the “in so far.” He too will
declare “J and my Father are one.” .

Mensch, was du liebst, in das wirst du verwandelt werden;
Gott wirst du, liebst du Gott, und Erde, liebst du Erden.
(V, 200.) *
Ein grundgelassner Mensch ist ewig frey und Ein.
Kann auch ein Unterscheid an ihm und Gotte seyn?
(II, 141.) 2
Wer ist als wir’ er nicht, und wir’ er nie geworden,
Der ist (0 Seligkeit!) zu lauter Gotte worden.
(1, 92.) §

In the preface to the “Cherubinischer Wanders-
mann,” however, he explains what he means by this
oneness with God. It is not strange that he felt the
necessity of explanation if such terms as Vergottung
and Gottwerdung were to pass the ecclesiastical cen-
sor. Even with his explanation it seems remarkable
that the book received the “Approbatio” of the
Jesuit judge and the “Imprimatur”’ of the Rector

t Whate’er thou lovest, Man, that too become thou must;
God, if thou lovest God; dust, if thou lovest dust.

2 One who is freed from earth has wholeness, liberty.
How betwixt him and God can any difference be?

3 Who is as he were not, as he had never been,
Has become very God. O blessedness serene!

ANGELUS SILESIUS 113

of the University of Vienna. Here is his bidding for
orthodoxy:

Inasmuch as the following rhymes contain many un-
usual paradoxes or contradictory expressions and many
profound conclusions not familiar to everyone in regard
to the mystery of the Godhead — as, for example,
union with God or with the Divine being, the Divine
likeness, deification, becoming God, and the like —
expressions to which, on account of the condensed style,
one might easily ascribe a reprehensible sense or give
an evil meaning, it is necessary to warn the reader in
advance.

It must be understood once for all that the author’s
meaning is in no case that the human soul should or
can lose its created character and become changed
through deification into God or His uncreated being.
For though God is almighty, this He cannot do — and
if He could, He would not be God — to make a creature
God by nature and essence. So Tauler says in his spirit-
ual instructions: ‘‘Since the Most High cannot make us
gods by nature, for this belongs to Him alone, He has
made us gods by grace, so that we may have blessedness,
joy, and one and the same kingdom with Him in ever-
lasting love.” He means by this that the favored holy
soul may attain such close union with God and His
Divine being as to be penetrated by it through and
through, transformed, united with it and made one; so
that, when men see it, they will see and recognize in it
no other than God. It will be as it is in the life eternal,
when the soul is wholly swallowed up by the brightness
of the Divine majesty. It will indeed attain such com-

114. HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

plete likeness to God as to be through grace what God
is by nature, and thus in a sense may rightly be called,
as in these verses, a god in God.

It was a reversal of the usual order of progress,
according to which the heresy of one generation be-
comes the orthodoxy of the next, that such opinions
could be approved by ecclesiastical authority in
1657, and in 1687 for holding the same opinions
Molinos could be condemned to the dungeons of the
Inquisition.

In setting forth the means by which this union
with God is to be attained, Silesius emphasizes
strongly the central doctrine of mysticism — dual-
ism. The Divine and the human are different; more
than that, they are mutually exclusive; the finite is
the opposite of the infinite, so that the more of one,
the less of the other. The only way then by which
they can come together is by one ceasing to be
itself. As it is unthinkable that God can be the one
to change and approach man, it must be on man’s
side that the approach is made. Man must empty
himself of all that is characteristic of humanity;
not only of positive sin, but of all desire, will, en-
deavor, which in this view become sin. He must
become nothing; and the more completely he suc-
ceeds in this self-annihilation, the more completely
he becomes one with God. There was in the seven-

* Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann (ed. Sulzbach, 1829); Vorrede,
Pp. Vi, vii.

ANGELUS SILESIUS 115

teenth century no study of comparative religion to
point out to Silesius his kinship with Buddhism, and
he had probably never heard of Plotinus. His spirit-
ual ancestors were Meister Eckart, Tauler, and most
directly, as I have said, Boehme, though he does
not care to mention him after his own conversion to
Romanism. His was the world-old line of thought
which dwells on the otherness of God, and which
meets us to-day in the Roman Mass, in popular
theories of the Atonement, and in the revivalist’s

song,
O to be nothing, nothing!
Only to lie at His feet,
A broken and empty vessel
For the Master’s uses meet!

Silesius is continually pressing home the need of
this self-emptying and of thorough-goingness in it,
and describing the blissful condition which results.
For this he has many names, — Abgeschiedenheit,
Abgestorbenheit, Vernichtigkeit, Ledigkeit, Gelassen-
heit, Heiligkeit, Gleichheit, Seligkeit, Friede, Ruhe.
When the process is complete and one has reached
ganzliche Verneinung des Willens, he has attained
Vergottung.

Die Heiligen sind darum mit Gottes Ruh umfangen

Und haben Seligkeit, weil sie nach nichts verlangen.
(I, 169.) *

= They who are held in God’s sweet peace are blest in this —
That they have no desire; therefore they dwell in bliss.

116 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

Mensch, so du etwas liebst, so liebst du nichts fiirwahr.
Gott is nicht diess und das; drum lass das Etwas gar.
(1 44.)"
Nicht bringt dich iiber dich, als die Vernichtigkeit.
Wer mehr vernichtig ist, der hat mehr Gottlichkeit.
(II, 140.) ?
Geh aus, so geht Gott ein; stirbt dir, so lebst du Gott;

Sey nicht, so ist es Er; thu nichts, so g’schieht’s Gebot.
(II, 136.) 3

Logic again drives him. “Then if desire is evil,
you must not desire even God.” “True,” replies he
sturdily:

Ein wahrer armer Mensch steht ganz auf nichts gericht.

Gibt Gott ihm gleich sich selbst, ich weiss, er nimmt Ihn
nicht. (II, 148.) 4

Even Christ had to conform to this rigid law of
_will-lessness:
Auch Christus, war in Ihm ein kleiner eigner Wille,

Wie selig Er auch ist, Mensch! glaube mir, Er fiele.
(V, 32.) s

Like every profound thinker, Silesius does not
balk at the necessity for holding opposites. Consist-

* Thou lovest not aright, lov’st thou aught here below.
God is not This nor That; so let the Somethings go.
? Nought raises thee above thyself like nothingness.
God is the more in thee as thou thyself art less.
3 Go out, and God comes in; die, God thy soul will fill.
Be not, and there is He; do nought, He has His will.
4 One who is truly poor, no compromise can make.
Should God give him Himself, even this he would not take.
5 Christ himself, if he had an atom of self-will,
However holy too, would not have been Christ still.

ANGELUS SILESIUS 117

ency is not to be attained by an “either, or.” He
may choose to hold both or neither. He is like a
dog hunting. One who looks from a distance might
think directness of aim was the last thing to be
ascribed to him, as he turns here and there and
forward and backward; yet all the time, though his
path is crooked, his course is straight on the scent.
So Silesius, though he has declared that the human
will must be wholly dead, yet declares also that it is
the will which preserves each in his condition:

Der Will macht dich verlor’n, der Will macht dich gefunden,

Der Will der macht dich frey, gefesselt und gebunden.
(VI, 82.) *

Gott kann schon ewiglich nicht die Verdammten finden,
Weil sie stets durch ihr’n Will’n vor Ihm in Pfuhl ver-
schwinden. (VI, 81.) 2

It is not God’s decree but only the Devil’s own
perverse will that keeps him a devil; and here
Silesius is even more hopeful for the lord of hell
than Robert Burns:

Die Sonne muss ihr Licht all’n, die es woll’n, gewahren.
Der Teufel wird erleucht, wollt’ er zu Gott sich kehren.

(VI, 40.) 3

t Thy will, it makes thee lost; thy will, it makes thee found;
Thy will, it makes thee free, or fast in fetters bound.

2 God cannot find a wretch deep in the pool of hell
Because it is his settled will therein to dwell.

3 The sun, on all who turn to him, must brightly burn.
The Devil’s face would shine, if he to God would turn.

118 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

Gott ist dem Belzebub nah wie dem Seraphin.
Es kehrt nur Belzebub den Riicken gegen Ihn.
(V, 72.) *

Again, while he maintains that the finite must be
absorbed in the infinite, he insists that this does not
abolish personality. And here, in spite of startling
expressions, he parts company from the thorough-
going mystic, who walks straight up to a void Nir-
vana. But what Silesius welcomes is not annihilation
but absorption, when, in presence of the glorious
Infinite, all other beings are drowned, like stars in
day. Personality, he maintains, persists after death.

Der Geist lebt in sich selbst. Gebricht ihm gleich das Licht,
(Wie ein Verdammter wird) so stirbet er doch nicht.
(II, 160.) 2
Ich glaube keinen Tod. Sterb’ ich gleich alle Stunden,
So hab ich jedesmal ein besser Leben funden.
(I, 30.) 3
Ich sag, es stirbet nichts; nur dass ein ander Leben,
Auch selbst das peinliche, wird durch den Tod gegeben.
(I, 36.) 4

Such union is so close that it becomes indissolu-
ble; God Himself cannot tear it apart. The particu-

* God is both to the Fiend and to the Seraph near.
But the Fiend turns his back on God, and will not hear.
? Spirit must ever live. It may in darkness lie,
As do the damned; yet even then it cannot die.
3 There is no death, I hold. Should I die every hour,
Yet every hour there is a better life in store.
4 Nothing that is, can die. It is but life again
That follows death, even though a life of fiercest pain.

ANGELUS SILESIUS 11g

lar becomes as necessary to the universal as the
universal to the particular. I am essential to God.

Gott is mir Gott und Mensch; ich bin Ihm Mensch und Gott.
Ich lésche seinen Durst, und Er hilft mir aus Noth.

(1, 224.) 7
Wer Gott vereinigt ist, den kann Er nicht verdammen;
Er stiirze sich dann selbst mit ihm in Tod und Flammen.
(I, 97.) ?
Ich weiss dass ohne mich Gott nicht ein Nun kann leben.

Werd’ ich zu nicht, Er muss von Noth den Geist aufgeben.
(I, 8) 8

Gott mag nicht ohne mich ein einzigs Wiirmlein machen.
Erhalt Ich’s nicht mit Ihm, so muss es stracks zukrachen.

(I, 96.) 4

This abolition of distinctions which takes place in
man and his relation to God, is the case with God
also. He too, since He is infinite, can have neither
passions nor parts; for these would constitute limi-
tation. He is incomplex, of whom no affirmation
can be made. The more He is known, the more He
becomes unknowable.

tT find in God a man; I find in man a God.
I slake His thirst, and He must needs help me, a clod.

2 He who is joined to God can suffer no damnation;
For God Himself would perish in His conflagration.

8 Apart from me, I know God cannot live a minute.
Should I leave life, He too could not continue in it.

4 God without me cannot create a worm. If I
Hold not with Him, it and creation’s self would die.

120 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

Mensch, Gott gedenket nichts. Ja, wir’n in Ihm gedanken,
So kénnt Er hin und her, welch’s Ihm nicht zusteht, wanken.

(V, 173.) *
Wir beten: es gescheh, mein Herr und Gott, dein Wille;
Und sieh, Er hat nicht Will’; Er ist ein ew’ge Stille.

(I, 294.) *
Gott ist ein lauter Nichts; Ihn riihrt kein Nun noch Hier.
Je mehr du nach Ihm greifst, je mehr entwird Er dir.

(I,-25.) 3

Silesius, however, is saved from the abyss of
Quietism, the reducing of God to an unintelligible x,
by his ebullient insistence upon the glories of God —
His bountifulness, long-suffering, grace, love, will.
These he persists in rejoicing in, regardless of the
exigencies of thought which would forbid them. He
is convinced that though the clouds of dialectic and
the darkness of infinity are round about God, yet
righteousness and judgment are the habitation of
His throne. This conviction the Cherubinischer
Wandersmann carries with him in all his travels.
Like all the mystics, Silesius holds that the knowl-

edge of God comes not through the processes of the
intellect, but through intuitive perception; it is a
vision, not a conclusion. He echoes the Apostle’s

* God thinks not. Had He thoughts, they must go here and
yonder.
But it consists not with His changelessness to wander.
2 “Thy will be done, O Lord my God!” we pray not well.
He has no will, but in eternal calm must dwell.
3 God is a simple Naught; He has nor Here nor Now.
The more thou searchest Him, the less attainest thou.

ANGELUS SILESIUS 121

declaration, “Knowledge puffeth up, but love up-
buildeth.”

Viel wissen blahet auf. Dem Geb’ ich Lob und Preis,
Der den Gekreuzigten in seine Seele weiss.

(V, 84.)
Der nachste Weg zu Gott ist durch die Liebe Thiir.
Der Weg der Wissenschaft bringt dich gar langsam fiir.

(V, 320.) ?
Halt an, mein Augustin; eh’ du wirst Gott ergriinden,
Wird man das ganze Meer in einem Griiblein finden.

(IV, 22.) 3

Of the path which leads to the knowledge of God
he says with Isaiah, “A highway shall be there, even
a way, and it shall be called the Way of Holiness.
The unclean shall not pass over it, but it shall be
for others. The wayfaring men though fools shall not
err therein.”

I have accused Scheffler of stumbling at times into
telicity of expression or of thought or even into
beauty. Perhaps passages like these may justify
the accusation:

Stirb, ehe du noch stirbst, damit du nicht darfst sterben
Wann du nun sterben sollst; sonst méchtest du verderben.

(IV, 77.) 4

™ Much knowledge puffs one up. Him rather I extol
Who knows the Crucified abiding in his soul.
2 The nearest way that leads to God is through love’s gate.
Who takes the way of knowledge, comes by far too late.
3 Stay, Augustine; ere thou reducest God to rule,
A man will find the whole of ocean in a pool.
4 Die now before thou diest, that thou mayst not die
When thou shalt die; else shalt thou die eternally.

122 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

Ein Kind, das auf der Welt nur eine Stunde bleibt,
Das wird so alt als man Mathusalem beschreibt.
(II, 168.) *
In Gott ist alles Gott; ein einziges Wiirmelein
Das ist in Gott so viel als tausend Gotte seyn.
(II, 243.) ?
Die Seele die nichts sucht als eins mit Gott zu seyn,
Die lebt in steter Ruh’, und hat doch steter Pein.
(VI, 176.) 3
Gott ist nicht alles nah. Die Jungfrau und das Kind,
Die Zwei die sind’s allein, die Gott’s Gespielen sind.
(I, 296.) 4
Die Ros’ ist ohn Warum; sie bliihet, weil sie bliihet.
Sie acht’t nicht threr selbst, fragt nicht, ob man sie siehet.
(I, 289.) §
Mensch, suchst du Gott um Ruh’, so ist dir noch nicht recht.
Du suchest dich, nicht Ihn; bist noch nicht Kind, nur Knecht.
(I, 58.) °
Du klagst, die Creatur’n die bringen dich in Pein; :
Wie? miissen sie doch mir ein Weg zu Gotte seyn.

(II, 114.) 7

t A child who in the world lives but an hour, he
Is old as e’er Methuselah was said to be.

2 What is of God is God. A thousand Gods, I say,
Might be; and yet a worm is God as much as they,

3 The soul that only seeks oneness with God to attain
Lives in perpetual peace, and has perpetual pain.

4 Two there are close to God — not all to Him are near —
The maiden and the child — these are God’s playmates dear.

5 The rose is without “Why?” It blows because it blows.
It cares not for itself, nor if seen even knows.

6 Seekest thou God for rest, thou hast thyself beguiled
Thou seek’st thyself, not God; a servant, not a child.

7 The creatures, thou lamentest, lead thy soul astray.
Nay let them rather be for thee to God a way.

ANGELUS SILESIUS 123

This last couplet proclaims Silesius no ascetic, and
anticipates the exhortation of Browning’s Rabbi
Ben Ezra:

All good things

Are ours, nor soul helps flesh more now than flesh helps soul.

The Bible begins with a transcendent God, the
world and all things therein made by a Creator out-
side it. The Bible ends — if the Fourth Gospel is the
book latest in date — with an immanent God, one
who mingles Himself with the winds that blow as
they list and with the words of our mouth and the
meditation of our heart. But as religion has become
more profound, it has sternly demanded the unity
of God. It will not allow many gods; there can be
but one. This just insistence upon monotheism, how-
ever, has often failed to learn an important lesson
from polytheism — the lesson of the value of com-
plexity. To the polytheist the multifarious agencies
of the world, though not all from the same source,
are yet all divine. He sees “‘an earth crammed with
heaven and every common bush afire with God.”
The monotheist must draw a line between what
he considers is proper to God and what is not; and
the result is, on one side, a God all of a kind, and
on the other side, a large part of the world without
a God in it. Moreover, the more completely he raises
God above the world, the more he removes Him
from apprehension. Anything in Him which human-
ity could touch would be a derogation to his unique-

124 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

ness, and He therefore becomes not only solitary
but unknowable, the x of a cosmic algebra. But
monotheism may be saved from atheism by taking
a hint from its sister polytheism and carrying it
further. If the human mind demands both com-
plexity and unity in God, then unity must itself be
complex. And the moment the idea is apprehended,
the mind exclaims in amazement at its own dulness,
“Why, of course!” And then the instances come
crowding in. Every government, so the modern
world is perceiving, must include federated states;
every complete family, both parents and children;
every living body, nerves and muscles; every ma-
chine, wheels and shafts. Every union which is not
such by cohesion only must be organic, its parts
finding the ground of their being in the whole and
the whole present in every part. Then, says the
mind, jumping from earth to heaven, the infinite
must include the finite; then they are not diverse,
the finite the opposite of the infinite. Then the
finite belongs of necessity to the infinite, and the in-
finite must have it, not out of kindness to the finite,
but in the interest of its own infinity. But if the
finite is that which is limited, does not this establish
limitation in the very bosom of the infinite? Yes,
and because it is established there, it is no bar to
infinity. For then infinity exhibits itself, not as the
unlimited, but as the self-limited. The finite then
becomes that which is limited from without itself
and the infinite that which is limited from within

ANGELUS SILESIUS 125

itself; and at once the antagonisms of dualism and
Angelus Silesius’s paradox of the necessity of man
to God disappear. God cannot exist without me any
more than I can without God.

To exhibit such union the best magnifying glass
is marriage.

For we have grown as part to part,

One filling out the other’s being;

Implying each, like blood and heart;

In each implied, like eyes and seeing.

Such closest union has amazed

Our happy souls, its depths unfolding;

And through it, awe-struck, we have gazed,

God and His glory thus beholding.

We find it expressed more accurately and pro-
foundly in Shakespeare’s “The Phoenix and the

Turtle”:

So they loved, as love in twain
Had the essence but in one;
Two distincts, division none;
Number there in love was slain. .

Property was thus appalled,
That the self was not the same;
Single nature’s double name
Neither two nor one was called.

Reason, in itself confounded,
Saw division grow together;

To themselves yet either neither,
Simple were so well compounded

That it cried, “How true a twain
Seemeth this concordant one!”
Love hath reason, reason none,
If what parts can so remain.

126 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS
‘The Bible is full of the thought that God needs

man’s aid in redeeming the world, a real need, the
withholding of which will retard the redemptive
process. Meroz is cursed because it came not to the
help of the Lord against the mighty. And it was this
interwovenness of God and man which formed the
ground of Jesus’ argument for immortality. It is
sometimes regarded as a mere quibble that he
should put forth the statement, “I am the God of
Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of
Jacob,” as proof that these persons were still liv-
ing.* But the argument is sound. If Abraham, Isaac,
and Jacob were united to God while on earth, they
came to form part of His being; and if once they
became a part of Him, they must be ever a part,
unless they have ceased to be such as in character
they were. For God cannot change, and unless they
did, they. are still component and therefore living
in Him; for God is not the God of the dead but of
the living. Angelus Silesius likens the presence of
God in all that is His to the presence of the number
one in all the other numbers:

Gleichwie die Einheit ist in einer jeden Zahl,
So ist auch Gott der Ein’ in Dingen iiberall.? (V, ee)

And this insistence of the One in demanding its
implications is the assurance of the permanence of
the parts and therefore of personal immortality.

* St. Matt. 22, 32.
? As numbers great or small the number One imply,
So too is God the One in all things low or high.

ANGELUS SILESIUS 127

This, this we know;
For one must have its two,
If two are one — foreseeing,
Where thought can reach,
Each soul will carry each
Stamped in its inmost being.

For one means two, and two means four,
And four means fifty million more;

And fifty million stopped the sun
Because they missed one little one.

God cannot rest in His eternal bliss
Without each atom which was ever His.

If thou in me and I in thee have grown
And both in God, then all we three are one.

Many of the followers of mysticism have found
peace in the great surrender it requires. When the
tired mind gives up its problems, when the proud
will bows itself, when the fierce passions cease their
clamorous demands, then the soul feels itself lying
without struggle and at rest in the arms of the infi-
nite. Such a rest is indeed restful if it 1s temporary
and partial. If it is thoroughgoing, it is death; for
it is the annihilation of personality, and therefore a
diminution of the glory of God. The Seer of the
Apocalypse in his celestial vision once saw the voice
of the place hushed; there was silence in heaven.
But it was but for half an hour, and then the great
chorus of praise and of judgment was resumed by
angels and men.t If the doctrine of the complex
infinite is true, God’s glory consists not in the ab-

T Rev., 8, I.

128 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

sence of other personalities but in their most numer-
ous and fullest development. Each is not only an
advertisement but an embodiment of Him. Let a
man claim all knowledge as his right; let him sharpen
his will till it is keen and firm; let him covet earn-
estly the best gifts; let him aim high — and it can-
not be too high. It is thus that he will bex‘for the
Master’s uses meet,” rather than by being “a
broken and empty vessel.” The barren lifelessness
of mysticism is not the peace of heaven.

Many of the most noted mystics have freed them-
selves from the deadening effect of its negations
because to them these were only parts of a higher
affirmation, and it has been the glory of the affirma-
tion in which they have rejoiced. To abstain from
any assertion about God because of a narrow con-
ception of personality is one thing; to abstain,
blinded with seeing, because He is so gloriously be-
yond all description, is another. To the higher mys-
tics, therefore, mysticism has brought a wealth which
persons of their temperament could probably have
gained in no other way. Vistas open to them and
far voices call. But the form of mysticism which has
leavened popular religious thought — and _ this
leaven is extensive — is pernicious through the es-
tablishment of a false ideal — the suppression of
personality as the means of approach to God. It is
this which is largely responsible for that erroneous
supposition of those who know religion but little,

ANGELUS SILESIUS 129

that it is feeble, joyless, measured by its abstentions,
lacking in virility and power. Such a conception
paralyzes effort; it does not hold up amplitude of
life as the Christian’s aim and right; it embalms a
dead past. It refuses to follow the Psalmist when
he declares, “I will walk before the Lord in the
land of the living.” Such souls, though starting with
a vision of the glories of God, through a mistaken
response to it become narrower and feebler; like the
rivers which instead of growing fuller and richer as
they roll, become more and more shallow, until at
last they are dried up and lost in barren wastes of
sand.

I said that Silesius holds that knowledge of God
comes not through the processes of the intellect but
through intuitive perception. This is a fundamental
position of the mystics, so fundamental that to
many it seems almost their sole distinguishing char-
acteristic. The knowledge of God is to them not
understanding but vision, and therefore certainty.
Ask them how they are sure of that “therefore,”
and they would perhaps ask in reply how you know
that two and two are four. It is because it is; and
this conviction flashes upon them with a clearness
and intensity which are their own assurance. Such
evidence can of course be valid for themselves alone.
The “Why?” which would be the bridge between
them and others, they cannot build. So, though the
sight of their confident faith may be impressive to

130 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

a beholder, the grounds of it he must investigate for
himself, for they cannot impart them. Yet this is not
denying that these grounds may have validity for
them. For the deepest intercourse between mind
and mind is not limited by the senses but far tran-
scends word or sight. The communications of the
spirit are like the wind, of which “thou canst not
tell whence it cometh nor whither it goeth.” Samuel
Butler says of excogitation: “Great thoughts are
not to be caught in this way. They must present
themselves for capture of their own free will, or be
taken with a little coyness only.” * All the processes
of life at their fullest must be unconscious; other-
wise, like manners, they become vulgar. But it must
be an unconsciousness which is positive, not nega-
tive; that is, which has passed through the stage of
consciousness and which may, if need be, revert to
it at any moment and feel its intellectual base. The
skilled pianist in the midst of his sonata does not
think of the notes or fingers; but if a hitch occurs,
he can stop and adjust the one to the other. Wealth
is measured by the things one takes as matters of
course. To the poor man, having a dinner is a ground
for congratulation; the rich man accepts it as a
part of the unthought-about order of things. If one
is apprehensive how this or that will affect his
friend, the friendship has not reached its height:
“He that feareth is not made perfect in love.”

* God the Known and God the Unknown, chap. IV, sect. 2.

ANGELUS SILESIUS 131

Consciousness is a necessary step to the fullest de-
velopment, but it is not itself the highest step.

Science is telling us to-day of a means of inter-
course of which, while she confesses her ignorance
what it is, she yet seems to have confidence that it
is. This power of second sight, thought-transference,
telepathy, which gives the key to faith-healing and
many other apparent miracles, when it comes to our
fuller knowledge will undoubtedly explain much of
that immediate intercourse between minds which
now seems mysterious, or often merely imaginary.
But if it is possible for thought to pass from one
mind to another by intuitive perception, there is
surely no field fitter for its exercise than between
the soul and God. Ask a soul so engaged, “How do
you know that it is God at the other end of the
telephone and not your own fancies merely?” and
he would probably smile and turn away repeating
his steadfast conviction, “J knew a man caught up
to the third heaven, whether in the body I cannot
tell or out of the body I cannot tell, God knoweth.
But he heard unspeakable words, which it is not
possible for man to utter.” *

All we can say of these mystic states is that they
may rightfully carry authority for those who have
them; that they can have no authority for others;
but that to grant their authority for anyone is to

Eo Cor, 1252

132 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

overthrow the claim of the intellectual powers to be
the sole ground of authority. The mystic’s claim to
immediacy in the perception of truth may point the
way to a larger world than that dominated by the
rational understanding; a world whose ways of inter-
course are as much swifter than the ordinary pro-
cesses of thought as wireless telegraphy is swifter
than foot-messengers; a world in which St. John’s
sublime conjunction “for” is justified: “We shall
be like Him, for we shall see Him as He is.”
Spinoza was said to be a God-intoxicated man.

Angelus Silesius was a man who panted to lose him-
self in God. But it must surely be that He who wills
not that one of his little ones should perish, would
not permit such suicide to be successful, but that
one who thus aimed to lose his life for God’s sake
would find it. The epitaph which Silesius wrote
“On an Upright Man” may well be his own:

Hier ist ein Mann gelegt, der stets im Durste lebte,

Und nach Gerechtigkeit bey Tag und Nachte strebte,

Und nie gesattigt ward. Nun ist ihm allbereit

Sein Durst gestillt mit Gott der siissen Ewigkeit.
(IIT, 49.)

Angelus Silesius sought God; and, as always,
more abundantly than he had dreamed, God met

Here lies a man who lived in thirst alway,
Who strove for righteousness by night and day,
And ne’er was satisfied. But, thirstless, he
Now dwells with God in sweet eternity.

ANGELUS SILESIUS 133

him. Like a river which, hemmed in on this side
and on that, still struggles on, ever aiming at the
sea; when, before it reaches the shore, the great
tide rushes up, meets it, enfolds it, and sweeps it into
the mighty depths in which it finds the glad fulfil-

ment of its aim.

IV

ISAAC WATTS

T is somewhat singular that the teachers of Prot-
estant theology who have had probably the
widest influence have been, not professors of divin-
ity, not preachers, not persons of any standing as
theological instructors, but unofficial men and wo-
men, often laymen and always self-appointed. For
I suppose it is unquestionable that poetry, and espe-
cially hymns, has spread theology more widely
than have treatises of divinity. Calvinism was
stamped upon English-speaking peoples, not so
much directly by the “Institutes” as by Milton’s
“Paradise Lost”; and even more efficient in estab-
lishing the system which came to be known as
Evangelicalism were the hymns of the eighteenth
century; secondarily those of Newton and the Wes-
leys, but primarily those of Isaac Watts. The forma-
_ tive influence of Watts, especially upon the religious
life of New England, has been profound.
Hymn-singing is to us so much a matter of course
that few persons probably are aware how recent a
feature in public worship it is, and how great a
strife was involved before it became established.
Singing, it is true, formed part of the church service
from primitive times; but the hymns of the Oriental

ISAAC WATTS 135

and Latin churches were generally sung by priest
and choir, not by the people but for them, and
throughout the Middle Ages not in the mother
tongue. After the Reformation the necessity was felt
for songs in the vernacular in which all the people
could join; and Luther’s hymns sent the Reformed
— doctrines flying through Germany, while the Psalms
in Clement Marot’s version were sung by French
courtiers and peasants and fell from the lips of
Huguenots as their heads fell at Amboise. In Eng-
land the same need gave rise to the metrical version
‘ of the Psalms by Sternhold and Hopkins, which was
adopted by the Church of England in 1562, and con-
tinued to be used for nearly two centuries and a half.
But, let it be noted, in both the last two cases it was
Psalms that were sung, not hymns. The Psalms, it
was maintained, were inspired, while hymns were
not. This argument would seem to compel the use
of the holy text in every particular, without the
change of a word and even in the original Hebrew;
and there were those who stood up sturdily to the
logic of the situation, and stumbled through the
difficulties of trying to get a congregation to chant
the very words of the Scripture, though not in the
original. Chanting, however, had a certain popish
flavor; and to avoid both this and unworshipful dis-
cord, metrical versions were tolerated. In King
Edward the Sixth’s chapel a metrical version of the
Acts of the Apostles was in use, and the royal ear

136 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

was edified by listening to such inspiring strains as
the following:
It chaunced in Iconium,
As they oft tymes did use,

Together they into did come
The sinagoge of Jeus.

Where they did preache and only seke~
God’s grace them to atchieve;

That soe they speke to Jeu and Greke
That many did bileve. *

Some, however, took refuge in banishing music
altogether; and in the case of the Nonconformists in
the latter half of the seventeenth century there was
an additional reason for this. Singing might betray
to the informer the meeting-house or the wood
where the persecuted were assembled. Among those
congregations which had no singing was the Baptist
church in London, whose pastor was Benjamin
Keach, and of which half a century ago Mr. Spur-
geon was pastor. In 1691 Keach published a book
entitled “The Breach Repaired in God’s Worship;
or Singing of Psalms, Hymns, and Spiritual Songs
Proved to be an Holy Ordinance of Jesus Christ.”

t The first mention of the substitution of congregational psalmody
for the old choral mode of worship places it in the reign of King Ed-
ward VI: “On March 15, 1550, M. Vernon, a Frenchman by birth
but a learned Protestant and parson of St. Martin’s, Ludgate, preached
at St. Paul’s Cross before the mayor and aldermen, and after sermon
done they all sung in common a psalm in metre, as it seems now was

frequently done, the custom being brought to us from abroad by the
exiles.” Nichols’s Progress of Queen Elizabeth, i, 54.

ISAAC WATTS 137

This led after long discussion to the decision by his
congregation to introduce singing; whereupon a dis-
approving minority seceded and established a place
of worship for themselves, unpolluted by song. *
Other churches compromised on the Psalms in a
metrical version, but, feeling that the line must be
drawn somewhere, drew it at hymns. This issue
again rent churches asunder. In 1623 George Wither
published “Hymnes and Songs of the Church”; and
he succeeded in procuring a letter-patent ordering
that it should be inserted in every copy of the
authorized “ Psalm-book in meeter.” But the hymns
never became popular, and in 1634 the permission
was withdrawn. We may perhaps trace some influ-
ence of Wither upon Watts, especially between
the former’s evening hymn, “Behold the sun that
seemed but now, Enthronéd overhead,” and the
latter’s ‘““Thee we adore, eternal Name”’ (II, 55),
t “A curious controversy once agitated this body [the Baptists],
as to the propriety of singing at all in worship; a practice which, at
one period, they generally omitted. Mr. Keach was the first who
broke the ice; he began to introduce singing at the ordinance; after
a struggle of six years it was added to the devotions of thanksgiving
days; and after fourteen years more of perseverance and debate, it
was permitted at the close of each service on the Sabbath, that those
who chose might withdraw and not have their ears offended by the
sound. The church, however, divided, and the inharmonious formed
a new society, which still flourishes in May’s Pond. Isaac Marlowe
fiercely opposed Mr. Keach, designating the practice as ‘error, apos-
tasy, human tradition, prelimited forms, mischievous error, carnal

worship.’ ”” Thomas Milner, Life, Times, and Correspondence of Rev.
Tsaac Watts, p. 360.

138 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

and between Wither’s “Lullaby” and Watts’s cele-
brated “Cradle Hymn.” Yet the influence, if it
exists, is shown not in imitation but rather in sim-
plicity of subject and feeling.

The aversion to hymn-singing had a certain justi-
fication in the strong influence which, as I have said,
hymns exert, and the possibility — which.unfortu-
nately, as we see, is no mere possibility — that er-
roneous opinions held by the well-meaning but
ignorant authors of the hymns may be inculcated
by them. It was Isaac Watts, who has been called
almost the inventor of hymns in our language, who
bridged the chasm between the songless or Psalm-
using worship and the exuberant hymn-singing of
our day. |

He was born at Southampton in 1674. His father
kept a boarding-school and was a Nonconformist.
This latter fact prevented the boy from going to the
university; for though some friends offered to meet
the expense of a university education for him, this
would have involved his becoming a member of the
Church of England; and with the memory of
the imprisonment for religion which his father had
suffered, while his mother sat with Isaac in her arms
on the stone at the prison-door, he refused the offer.
Stories are told of his youthful precocity in litera-
ture — that he began to read Latin at four years
old, and Greek and Hebrew soon after; that he
composed respectable devotional verses at seven or

ISAAC WATTS 139

eight; that he devoured books and spent his casual
pennies for them. Reverend Samuel Price, his col-
league in the pastorate, gives the following account
of the beginning of his hymn-writing, before he was
fifteen years old:

The hymns which were sung at the Dissenting Meet-
ing at Southampton were so little to the gust of Mr.
Watts that he could not forbear complaining of them to
his father. The father bid him try what he could do to
mend the matter. He did; and had such success in his
first essay, “Behold the glories of the Lamb,” that a
second hymn was earnestly desired of him, and then a
third and fourth, till in process of time there was such
a number of them as to make up a volume."

This is an instance of the excellence and the defect
of Watts as a hymn-writer. Apart from the fact that
it is remarkable that a hymn like this could have
been written by so young a person, the hymn shows
Watts’s directness of statement, ease of expression,
and vividness in depicting a scene; but its origin was
the demand of an external occasion rather than the
compulsion of an internal impulse. Much of his
poetry is of this stamp, and therefore tends to being
machine-made. It would have been well if he had
taken the advice of his friend Sir Edward King,
who said to him in early life, “Young man, I hear
that you make verses. Let me advise you never to
do it but when you cannot help it.”

* The Hymn-Lover, W. Garrett Horder, p. 98.

140 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

When he was fifteen he was sent to an academy
in London, whose principal, Reverend Thomas
Rowe, was also minister of a congregation of Inde-
pendents. On leaving the academy he entered on
one of those periods of mental incubation in which
poets— Milton, Tennyson, and many others—have
often engaged. He spent two years and a half in his
father’s house, doing nothing so far as accomplish-
ment was visible, but, like another Congregational
poet — Robert Browning — reading, meditating,
writing, training himself in the handling of verse.
Then for five years he was tutor in the family of
Sir John Hartopp at Stoke Newington, a London
suburb. For the last three of these years he was also
assistant minister at the Mark Lane Independent
Chapel in London; and when in 1701 the pastor,
Dr. Isaac Chauncy, retired, Watts accepted a call
to succeed him.

His health, however, had never been strong since
a serious illness which he had when he was fifteen
years old. Moreover, he had none of the modern
knowledge of hygiene which enables feeble bodies to
defy their limitations. So he indulged himself in
_ hard work and little exercise and sleep cut short,
till after a few months in the pastorate another
severe illness laid him aside. He must have had
much sweetness, intellectual power, and personal
attraction to account for the devotion which his con-
gregation even after so short a connection showed

ISAAC WATTS 141

him, and for their patience with his limitations
throughout his long life. In dedicating a volume of
sermons to his congregation he wrote: “Two and
twenty years are now expired since you first called
me to this delightful work. . . . Your forward kind-
ness hath always forbid my requests; nor do I
remember that you ever gave me leave to ask any-
thing for myself at your hands, by your constant
anticipation of all that I could reasonably desire.” *

They gave him Reverend Samuel Price as an as-
sistant, and for nine years he was able to take his
duties with more or less regularity. Then another
long attack of fever was followed by what we should
call nervous prostration. Mr. Price now relieved him
from most of the duties of his office by becoming
co-pastor with him, and one of his friends, Sir
Thomas Abney, invited him for a visit to his house
at Theobald’s, some dozen miles north of London.
Watts went for a week, and remained with the
family for thirty-six years, as long as he needed an
earthly home.

Sir Thomas Abney was wealthy, prominent in
city affairs, and, though a Nonconformist, had been
in 1700 Lord Mayor of London. Theobald’s had
been built as a palace by Lord Burleigh but had
been destroyed by the Long Parliament. Part of the
splendid garden, however, still remained; and here,
overhung by two rows of elms, were a long walk and

Preface to Sermons on Various Subjects, vol. i.

142 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

a summer house, where Watts is said to have com-
posed many of his works. Sir Thomas and Lady
Abney were the kindest of friends to him and their
family became his own. Dr. Samuel Johnson found
somewhat similar hospitality in the home of Mr.
and Mrs. Henry Thrale at Streatham Park; and
shortly before Watts went to Sir Thomas‘Abney’s,
John Locke ended with his life a fourteen-year visit
to Sir Francis and Lady Masham at Oates in Essex.
Such a relation between host and guest was close
enough to require the distance of politeness and
distant enough to exclude close quarrelling; though
this was hardly the case always between Johnson
and the Thrales.

While Watts was living with the Abneys, Lady
Abney’s brother, Thomas Gunston, died, and left to
her his manor-house at Stoke Newington, which was
then a country village. Some time after, probably
about 1735, the Abneys removed to Stoke Newing-
ton, though Sir Thomas had died in 1722. Here
Watts spent the last thirteen years of his life. He
never married; and it was through the three daugh-
ters of his hosts, Sarah, Mary, and Elizabeth Abney,
that he gained that acquaintance with childhood
which led him to become the pioneer in the religious
education of children.

His residence with the Abneys did not interrupt
his relations with his parish; for whenever he wished
to officiate, Lady Abney’s carriage was at his dis-

ISAAC WATTS 143

posal, and when he did not feel able, his colleague,
Reverend Mr. Price, stood ready to supply his place.
The rush of parish work, which in our time drives
many a minister to constant business and intellect-
ual sterility, did not then exist. The demands of a
parish, apart from public services, were much the
same as they had been a century before in George
Herbert’s day; and though the duties of a city min-
ister were naturally more complex than those of a
country parson, they were on the same plan. “The
Country Parson,” says Herbert, “upon the after-
noons in the weekdays takes occasion sometimes to
visite in person now one quarter of his Parish, now
another. For there he shall find his flock most natu-
rally as they are, wallowing in the midst of their
affairs.”

To live in the country, with no household cares,
to drive into town and preach occasionally, to have
a colleague who should attend to the business of the
parish — such conditions would seem to some mod-
ern ministers ideal, to others ludicrously insuffi-
cient. To Dr. Watts they gave the opportunity of
establishing a close bond between himself and his
congregation, of gaining a prominent position as a
preacher and leader among the Nonconformists, of
publishing an amount of prose vast for even a liter-
ary person in that voluminous age, of attaining a
place — not of the first rank but indisputable —
among the poets of the language, and of moulding

144 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

the thoughts and kindling the emotions of English
Protestant Christians for more than a century.

After Sir Thomas Abney’s death his widow and
her daughters continued to care for their guest with
the same munificent and affectionate devotion they
had already shown. As he grew feeble, a friend
asked him one day how he was. “Waiting God’s
leave to die,” he replied. On November 25, 1748, in
his seventy-fifth year, the awaited permission came.

In 1722, the University of Edinburgh conferred on
him the degree of Doctor of Divinity. He was a
voluminous writer; in addition to his poetical works .
he wrote on logic, astronomy, geography, grammar,
pedagogics, and ethics. He published also in his
lifetime three volumes of sermons and twenty-nine
treatises on theology. His publications were fifty-
two in all. His collected works were issued in Lon-
don in 1810, in six volumes, and again in 1812, in
nine volumes. He has a monument in the cemetery
in Abney Park, where he is buried, and also in West-
minster Abbey, with a memorial hall and a statue
in his native Southampton.

It was the need for song better adapted to public
worship that led Watts to writing, and it was he
who constructed the bridge between the metrical
versions of the Psalms and the ampler hymnody of
our day. The further pier of his bridge was, it is true,
the Psalms in a metrical version. Like Lazarus, he
had “come forth,” but with the clothes of the dead

ISAAC WATTS 145

past still around him. But this version of his was
quite different from that of Sternhold and Hopkins,
or of Tate and Brady which had preceded it. They
had largely confined themselves to a Procrustean
arrangement of the biblical words into lines and
feet. But the character of Watts’s version was ex-
pressed in its title: “The Psalms of David Imitated
in the Language of the New Testament.” He never
hesitated to read the New Testament into the Old,
to substitute gospel for law, to make David sing the
song, not only of Moses, but of the Lamb. Thus
where the author of the 103d Psalm says, “Who
redeemeth thy life from destruction,” Watts ampli-
fies and transforms this into

’T is he, my soul, that sent his Son

To die for crimes that thou hast done.

That Watts had gauged the public need with ac-
curacy is shown by the reception which his Psalms
and hymns met. Among the Nonconformists they
drove out all others and dominated song in worship
for a century. Their influence reached New England
somewhat later than their home. “The Bay Psalm
Book,” published in 1640, was used here until the
middle of the next century, when it was superseded
by Tate and Brady, and this, toward the end of the
century, by Watts. A half-century later the Psalms
came to be generally disused and a wider range of
hymns desired. This led to the publication known as
“Watts and Select,” in which, to Watts’s Psalms

146 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

and hymns there were added two hundred and
thirty-four hymns by different authors.

Two obstacles have prevented a more general ap-
preciation of Watts’s poetry. One is the enormous
amount of his output and the consequent worthless-
ness of much of it. Few persons are patient enough
to wade through six hundred hymns, together with
two volumes of other poetry, in order to winnow the
grain from the chaff. But the nutritive grain is
there. The other obstacle is that the hymns are
generally regarded from a homiletic rather than a
poetic point of view. Their value is supposed to lie
in the doctrines which they set forth; and because
these doctrines are to-day for the most part out of
fashion, the hymns are relegated to the scrap-heap.
But their value lies, as with all poetry, not in incul-
cating an opinion but in conveying a mood. The
background must be granted. The pastoral poetry of
the eighteenth century dealt in nymphs and swains,
creatures as impossible to find in the country as
fairies or salamanders. But granting that the poet
chose to employ these figures, the important ques-
tion is, what did he do with them? So if one would
discover the value of Watts, his theological scenery
must be assumed. In order to understand him we
must see not merely the world but the universe, as
he saw it. Assume a great monarch sitting aloft upon
a throne, exercising a sway of arbitrary and absolute
power over those for whom the poet’s favorite desig-

ISAAC WATTS 147

nation is “worms of the dust.” Never mind whether
that is an adequate conception of God, but could
there be a more splendid statement of it than this?

Keep silence, all created things,
And wait your Maker’s nod!

My soul stands trembling while she sings
The honours of her God.

Life, death, and hell, and worlds unknown
Hang on his firm decree.

He sits on no precarious throne,
Nor borrows leave to be.

Chained to his throne a volume lies,
With all the fates of men,

With every angel’s form and size,
Drawn by the eternal pen.

Here he exalts neglected worms
To sceptres and a crown;

Anon the following page he turns
And treads the monarchs down.

Not Gabriel asks the reason why,
Nor God the reason gives,

Nor dares the favorite angel pry
Between the folded leaves. *

Or see the poet again as he stands with bated
breath before this sovereign presence:

* Hore Lyrica, p. 9. The references are to any edition of the
Psalms and the three books of Hymns, and to Hore Lyrica, ed. Little,
Brown, & Co., Boston, 1854.

148 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

The Lord! how fearful is his name!
How wide is his command!

Nature with all her moving frame
Rests on his mighty hand.

Immortal glory forms his throne,
And light his awful robe,
While with a smile or with a frown
He manages the globe. =

A word of his Almighty breath
Can swell or sink the seas,

Build the vast empires of the earth
Or break them, as he please.

Adoring angels round him fall
In all their shining forms;

His sovereign eye looks thro’ them all,
And pities mortal worms.

This thought of the Divine action as based, not
upon reasonableness but upon pure will is as in-
spiring to Watts as it is repulsive to us. He has a
thoroughly Hebraic joy in it.

When the Eternal bows the skies
To visit earthly things,

With scorn divine he turns his eyes
From towers of haughty kings;

Rides on a cloud disdainful by
A sultan or a czar,

Laughs at the worms that rise so high,
Or frowns ’em from afar.

* H. L., p. 86.

ISAAC WATTS 149

He bids his awful chariot roll
Far downward from the skies,

To visit every humble soul,
With pleasure in his eyes.

Why should the Lord, that reigns above,
Disdain so lofty kings?

Say, Lord, and why such looks of love
Upon such worthless things?

Mortals, be dumb! What creature dares
Dispute his awful will!

Ask no account of his affairs,
But tremble and be still.

Just like his nature is his grace,
All sovereign and all free.

Great God, how searchless are thy ways!
How deep thy judgments be! !

It would be difficult to express the majesty of
God more adequately than in the following verses:

Nature and time quite naked lie
To thine immense survey,

From the formation of the sky
To the great burning day.

Eternity, with all its years,
Stands present in thy view;

To thee there’s nothing old appears;
Great God, there’s nothing new.

Our lives through various scenes are drawn,
And vexed with trifling cares,

While thine eternal thoughts move on
Thine undisturbed affairs.

t H.L., p. 56.

1s0 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

Great God, how infinite are thou!
What worthless worms are we!
Let the whole race of creatures bow
And pay their praise to thee! *

Again, his heaven may not be ours, but see what
a charming place it is. He is as confident in regard
to its features and inhabitants as he is of the country
around Theobald’s. Yet if we smile in the superiority
of our knowledge or stiffen up and declare, “No such
topography for me!” we shall miss the sweetness
and felicity of such glad lines as these:
There is a land of pure delight
Where saints immortal reign;

Infinite day excludes the night,
And pleasures banish pain.

There everlasting Spring abides,
And never-withering flowers;
Death, like a narrow sea, divides

This heavenly land from ours.

Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood
Stand dressed in living green;

So to the Jews old Canaan stood,
While Jordan rolled between.

The incomparable joys of heaven, eagerness to
reach it, and the consequent insignificance of death,
are his favorite subjects. One leads to another.

My God, the spring of all my joys,
The life of my delights,

The glory of my brightest days
And comfort of my nights,

T II, 67. 2 11, 66.

ISAAC WATTS 161

In darkest shades if he appear,
My dawning is begun.

He is my soul’s sweet morning-star,
And he my rising sun.

My soul would leave this heavy clay
At that transporting word,

Run up with joy the shining way
To embrace my dearest Lord.

Fearless of hell and ghastly death,
I’d break through every foe;

The wings of love and arms of faith
Should bear me conqueror through.?

Those who have known Watts’s hymns have per-
haps no association with them more sacred than with
that one which they have often heard sung by pious
fathers and mothers, half in doubting hesitation,
half in triumphant confidence:

When I can read my title clear
To mansions in the skies,

I bid farewell to every fear
And wipe my weeping eyes.

Should earth against my soul engage
And hellish darts be hurled,

Then I can smile at Satan’s rage,
And face a frowning world.

Let cares like a wild deluge come,
And storms of sorrow fall;

May I but safely reach my home,
My God, my heaven, my all,

i Oe

152 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

There shall I bathe my weary soul
In seas of heavenly rest,

And not a wave of trouble roll
Across my peaceful breast.

Edwin Paxton Hood says: “The gifted nobleman
who was the Mecenas of the past age, was not an
indifferent critic, and when called on to cite the
most perfect verse in the language, he immediately
instanced” the last stanza above quoted.”

Such a celestial prospect makes one long for its
realization. Moses was the fortunate one in his
death, in spite of his disappointment, for he not only
received God’s commands but was accompanied at
every step by the comforting divine presence.

Sweet was the journey to the sky
The wondrous prophet tried;

“Climb up the mount,” says God, “and die!”
The prophet climbed and died.

Softly his fainting head he lay
Upon his Maker’s breast;

His Maker kissed his soul away
And laid his flesh to rest.

In God’s own arms he left the breath
That God’s own spirit gave.

His was the noblest road to death,
And his the sweetest grave.3

With such a blissful transition in view, death is a
welcome messenger, and a saint who is dying is to
be envied.

t TI, 65.

2 Isaac Watts, His Life and Writings, Homes and Friends, p. 104.
3H. L., p. 129.

ISAAC WATTS 153

Lord, when we see a saint of thine
Lie gasping out his breath,

With longing eyes and looks divine,
Smiling and pleased in death;

How could we e’en contend to lay
Our limbs upon that bed!

We ask thine envoy to convey
Our spirits in his stead.

Our souls are rising on the wing
To venture in his place,

For when grim Death has lost his sting
He has an angel’s face.

Oh! if my threatening sins were gone
And Death had lost his sting,

I could invite the angel on,
And chide his lazy wing.

Away, these interposing days,
And let the lovers meet!

The angel has a cold embrace,
But kind and soft and sweet.

I’d leap at once my seventy years,
I’d rush into his arms,

And lose my breath and all my cares
Amidst those heavenly charms.

Joyful, Id lay this body down
And leave the lifeless clay

Without a sigh, without a groan,
And stretch and soar away.?

However we may portray heaven, we are apt to
be squeamish about depicting hell, even if we con-
cede its existence. Though we may take symbols for

t H, L., p. 42:

164 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

realities elsewhere, we never think of regarding the
condition depicted in Dante’s Inferno as a state-
ment of fact. But Watts saw no reason for restrain-
ing his imagination in describing a locality which to
him was as real as the slums of London. Moreover,
the homiletic fashion of the Middle Ages, when the
torture of criminals was common and frequently a
public spectacle, had not ceased in Watts’s day, as
indeed it has not wholly in some quarters at present,
and preachers were accustomed to balance their ex-
hibition of the splendors of heaven by lurid descrip-
tions, reeking with brimstone and bristling with
horrors, of the torments of hell. Watts is much more
restrained than most of these, both in quantity and
quality. His hymns on this subject are compara-
tively few. The worst of them is the following:
My thoughts on awful subjects roll,
Damnation and the dead;

What horrors seize the guilty soul
Upon a dying bed!

Lingering about these mortal shores
She makes a long delay,

Till like a flood with rapid force,
Death sweeps the wretch away.

Then swift and dreadful she descends
Down to the fiery coast

Amongst abominable fiends,
Herself a frighted ghost.

There endless crowds of sinners lie,
And darkness makes their chains;
Tortured with keen despair they cry,

Yet wait for fiercer.pains.

ISAAC WATTS 155

Not all their anguish and their blood
For their old guilt atones,

Nor the compassion of a God
Shall hearken to their groans.

Amazing grace, that kept my breath,
Nor bid my soul remove

Till I had learned my Saviour’s death,
And well insured his love! ?

It is difficult in view of such verses to keep the com-
pact we made with the poet, and, while appreciating
his poetry as poetry, let him display his theology
unprotested.

His tendency to visualize scenes makes almost
every description vivid. One would hardly suppose
a study in anatomy could be put into a hymn; but
Watts accomplishes this feat, and makes the anat-
omy thoroughly poetic.

Let others boast how strong they be,
Nor death nor danger fear;

But we’ll confess, O Lord, to thee
What feeble things we are.

Our life contains a thousand springs,
And dies if one be gone.

Strange, that a harp of thousand strings
Should keep in tune so long!

He spoke, and straight our hearts and brains
In all their motions rose.
“Let blood,” said he, “‘flow round the veins!”
And round the veins it flows.
IT 2.

166 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

While we have breath to use our tongues,
Our Maker we ’Il adore.

His spirit moves our heaving lungs,
Or they would breathe no more.*

I said that it is difficult, in reading some of
Watts’s hymns, to take them for their poetic worth
and not cry out on their theology. It is especially
hard for a child-lover when the poet faces the dual-
ism at the base of his system of theologic thought
and carries it unflinchingly to its logical conclusion.
The Latin mind had from the first posited an oppo-
sition between the divine and the human. Whatever
is of the one is not of the other; the divine is non-
human, the human non-divine. It follows that cer-
tain departments belong to God, certain others to
man. “The heaven, even the heavens, are the Lord’s;
but the earth hath He given to the children of men.”
The torturing dilemma then presents itself: Which
shall I love, my friends or God? Not both, for what
is given to the one can but be just so much taken
from the other. I ought to love God supremely, but
can I refrain from loving my friends? Many a tender
conscience has been thus plunged into torment be-
cause it has not understood the First Epistle of St.
John. Watts felt obliged to versify on all the doc-
trines of his theology and therefore on this. If we
have an eye for beauty rather than for dogmatics,
we may forgive him his poem for the sake of one
line in it.

SILO:

ISAAC WATTS 157

Where’er my flattering passions rove
I find a lurking snare;

Tis dangerous to let loose our love
Beneath the Eternal Fair.

Souls which the tie of friendship binds,
And partners of our blood,

Seize a large portion of our minds,
And leave the less for God.

Nature has soft but powerful bands,
And reason she controls,

While children, with their little hands,
Hang closest to our souls.

Thoughtless, they act the old serpent’s part,
What tempting things they be!

Lord, how they twine about our heart
And draw it off from Thee!

Dear Sovereign, break these fetters off,
And set our spirits free!

God in himself is bliss enough,
For we have all in Thee.

We may well overlook the dreadfulness of his doc-
trine for the sake of the felicitous tenderness of that

What tempting things they be!

Watts himself seems to have felt that the poem
needed some excuse, for he never included it among
his hymns, and to the section of poems of which this
is the first, he added a note, saying that it may be
an apology for what may displease in them that

t H. L., p. 103.

158 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

they were written “in his youngest years.’”’ More-
over, he was regardlessly illogical in his practice, and
refused to dismiss the love of children as infringing
on love to God; for he was fond of children and de-
voted to the daughters of Sir Thomas and Lady
Abney. Much theology which he felt bound to hold
he, like other people, found it convenient*to be not
held by.

But more than this, he was the first to recognize
that children had poetic rights and to give them a
place in literature. In all Chaucer’s crowded picture-
gallery there is no portrait of a child; for the only
tale bearing on the subject is a monkish legend," and
its subject is as far from being a real child as is the
hero of an infant biography in a Sunday School
library. Spenser has nothing to do with children.
Shakespeare deals with them only four brief times.?
Milton, apart from his youthful poem on the Death
of a Fair Infant, does not mention them; for though
the actors of “Comus”’ were originally children, the
characters in the Masque are mature. Dean Colet
had cast on them a kindly eye, and had endeavored
to soften the asperities of learning for them.? But

* The Prioresse’s Tale.

2 Cf. King Fohn, King Henry V, Coriolanus, Macbeth.

3 In the Latin Grammar which he wrote for his school of St. Paul’s
he says: “For the love and zeal that I have to the new school of Paul’s
and to the children of the same, I have of the eight parts of grammar
made this little book. In which, if any new things be of me, it is
alonely that I have put these parts in a more clear order, and I have

ISAAC WATTS 1Sg

that child-world, whose discovery has been so
marked a feature of the last fifty years, was unknown
in the seventeenth century, and Isaac Watts was the
Columbus who brought it into notice. Not that he
had that interest in the study of children in them-
selves, that absorption in the charm of their looks
and ways, that admission of their concerns to a level
in dignity and importance with those of older people,
which characterize modern child-worship. These
have been later developments. To him, as to his con-
temporaries and our own benighted grandparents,
children were to be seen and not heard, and they
must ever be taught subordination, obedience, and
their own comparative unimportance. But Watts
had a profound interest in their education, especially
their education in religion. He endeavored to con-
struct a path from the school-books, to which they
were driven by duty, into a field of literature to which
they would resort of themselves. The path, it is true,

made them a little more easy to young wits than (me thinketh) they
were before; judging that nothing may be too soft nor too familiar
for little children, specially learning a tongue unto them all strange.
In which little book I have left many things out of purpose, consider-
ing the tenderness and small capacity of little minds. . . . Wherefore
I pray you, all little babes, all little children, learn gladly this little
treatise and commend it diligently unto your memories, trusting that
of this beginning that ye shall proceed and grow to perfect literature,
and come at the last to be great clerks. And lift up your little white
hands for me, which prayeth for you to God, to whom be all honour
and imperial majesty and glory. Amen.” Frederic Seebohm, The Ox-
ford Reformers, p. 214.

160 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

conducted, not as with the children’s books of to-
day, to the flowery meadows of unhampered amuse-
ment, but to the uplands of morality and religion.
But it was a pleasant path, adapted to little feet;
and if a finger-post every now and then was pointing
a didactic moral, why, that was only what every
child expected and every grown person would have
been shocked to find absent. So Dr. Watts issued a
book, “‘ Divine and Moral Songs,” parts of which, it
is safe to say, have become almost as classic in the
childish world as Mother Goose. Few well-bred chil-
dren of the past generation — I cannot speak with
as much knowledge of those of the present — did
not know

Whatever brawls disturb the street,
There should be peace at home;

Where sisters dwell and brothers meet,
Quarrels should never come.

Birds in their little nests agree;
And ’tis a shameful sight

When children of one family
Fall out and chide and fight; *

and

Let dogs delight to bark and bite,
For God hath made them so.

Let bears and lions growl and fight,
For ’tis their nature too.

But, children, you should never let
Such angry passions rise;

Your little hands were never made
To tear each other’s eyes; ?

tHe Lag Ds 317: 2 Ibid., p. 316.

ISAAC WATTS 161

and
How doth the little busy bee
Improve each shining hour,
And gather honey all the day
From every opening flower!

How skillfully she builds her cell!
How neat she spreads the wax!

And labours hard to store it well
With the sweet food she makes!

In works of labour or of skill
I would be busy too;

For Satan finds some mischief still
For idle hands to do.?

His Cradle Hymn, “Hush, my Dear, lie still and
slumber,” has crooned many a tired child to sleep.
These “Divine and Moral Songs” deserve remem-
brance and respect not only as pioneers in literature
for children but for the intrinsic merit of many of
them. “Edition after edition rapidly issued from the
press in England and America, and translations have
since appeared in many of the European and trans-
atlantic languages. The number of copies that have
been circulated throughout the world must amount
to many millions; upwards of thirty millions in this
country are regularly kept in print; and, upon a
moderate computation, the average annual sale in
England only cannot be less than eighty thousand.”

In summing up the characteristics of Watts’s

tH. L., p. 320.

2 Thomas Milner, The Life, Times, and Correspondence of Rev.
Isaac Waits, p. 372.

162 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

poetry we may place first its reverence. It was a
time when the thought of the immanence of God in
nature and in man had almost fallen out of sight.
The devout Christian of our day sees God around
him so constantly, though he may not always call
the higher element in life which he sees by the name
of God, that the Divine presence is no surprise to
him; he takes it as a matter of course. But to the
men of the eighteenth century, filled as they were
with the thought of the Divine transcendence, it was
always a wonder and a surprise when the heavens
or the earth opened and behind the visible they be-
held God. They delighted, as they expressed it, to
“see God in His works”; and in the fields decked
with flowers, the towering mountain, the roaring sea,
the glittering night-sky, it was not directly beauty
that they saw, but the Jehovah of the Old Testament
suddenly revealed, and before such an immediate
vision they bowed in awe. This attitude of worship
is the chief characteristic of the best work of Watts.
He is occupied with the deepest subjects which can
interest men and which must interest them perpet-
ually. They wear in him, however, the dress of hisday,
and this unfortunately often repels us. But beneath
their dress lies their kinship with the souls of every
age. These subjects he always treats with befitting
dignity. More than that, when he approaches God
there is ever with him the sense of awe; he bows low
in the Divine presence. And as this is the subject

ISAAC WATTS 163

‘of profoundest interest to him, it is the field of
his most satisfactory work. He is almost unique in his
ability to convey the impression of sublimity. His
Muse is best when she walks with an “incedo re-
gina” air. It is sometimes supposed that the Puritan
mind had little interest in poetry. That interest is
often underestimated. But as the central doctrine of
Calvinism was the absoluteness of God, that poetry
was chiefly interesting to the Puritan which exhib-
ited this absoluteness in all its grandeur. It was
partly for this reason that Watts had so strong a
hold upon minds which inherited the Puritan tradi-
tion. In the austere doctrines which they held he
showed them the springs of feeling.

This is the second characteristic of his poetry —its
passion. His verses are by no means mere rhymed
theology, but they are the outpouring of the effect
of theology upon a sensitive and eager soul. He has
not only found, as an earnest thinker might, the
meat for daily life lying hidden in theologic doctrines,
but he has discovered the joy in them, the dread,
the inspiration, the bliss. He carries them over from
the domain of thought into that of feeling, and in
giving us their emotional value, awakens it in us.
The Puritan, contrary again to the popular impres-
sion, was not an unemotional person, though it took
something of the eternal to touch his emotions; but
when they were touched, they burned with a deep
and consuming fire. Lord Rosebery in one of his

164 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

speeches says: “The Puritan was a practical mystic,
the most formidable and terrible of all combina-
tions.” In a sermon on the use of the passions in
religion Watts exclaims:

Have they [preachers] no such thing as passion be-
longing to them? . . . Have they no springs of affection
within them? or do they think their hearers have none?
Or is passion so vile a power that it must be all devoted
to things of flesh and sense, and must never be applied
to things divine and heavenly? Who taught any of us
this lazy and drowsy practice? ... Did the great God
ever appoint statues for His ambassadors to invite sin-
ners to His mercy? Words of grace written upon brass
or marble would do the work almost as well... . How
careless and indolent is a whole assembly when the
preacher appears like a lifeless engine, pronouncing
words of law or grace, when he speaks of divine things
in such a cold and formal manner as though they had
no influence upon his own heart! When the words freeze
upon his lips, the hearts of hearers are freezing also.

The Romantic Movement had not yet awakened
men to behold the world; but that enthusiasm which
the Romanticist came to feel for the world of na-
ture, Watts felt for what he would have called the
world of grace; but his world, instead of having for
its contents hills and fields, had whatever concerned
God, the human soul, and salvation. If the Church
of England could have recognized the value of emo-
tion in religion and found a place for it within her

ISAAC WATTS 165

respectable doors, the Methodist Movement, of
which it was the very life-blood, would probably not
have resulted in secession. But during Watts’s boy-
hood Dr. South was denouncing enthusiasm as worse
than popery; “A monster,” he calls it, “from whose
teeming womb have issued some of the vilest, the
foulest, the most absurd practices and opinions that
the nature of man (as corrupt as it is) was ever
poisoned and polluted with.” * A generation before
the Wesleys and Doddridge taught people to sing
their religion, Watts was preparing the ground by
pouring forth psalms and hymns which were full of
ardent religious feeling.

Another characteristic of his poetry is its intro-
spection. In this, it is true, he is not alone, for most
religious poetry down to comparatively recent times
has been occupied chiefly with religion in its relation
to the individual. It was the distinctive note of
Puritanism that the human soul and God are the
two great objects which fill its vision. “God and I;
I and God,” was the solemn chant sounding per-
petually through the chambers in which the devout
Puritan soul dwelt. The modern development of a
social conscience had not yet awakened men to the
complexity of the soul and therefore to its corporate
relations with others. So Watts, like other devout
singers, sees primarily the Jacob’s Ladder connect-

t South’s Sermons, Satan Himself Transformed into an Angel of
Light.

166 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

ing heaven with himself. His introspection, how-
ever, we may perhaps say, has a somewhat different
emphasis from that of George Herbert, for example,
a century earlier. Herbert, in meditating on his soul
and God, fixes his gaze more on God—His outgoing
bounteousness, His unwearied search for men, His
familiar converse with them. It is the angels de-
scending that he sees. Watts is apt to give attention
rather to the other end of the Ladder — the condi-
tion of his own soul and the ascending angels. He
rejoices that he is among the saved; he wonders
whether he is; he is overcome at the thought that it
is for him that Christ died; he examines what came
to be called, in the curious religious phraseology of
the day, his “‘frames.”’ This, however, is not mere
egotism, for he regards himself as a type of every
earnest Christian. But he gave a strong impetus to
religion as a personal experience, to what was called
‘experimental religion,” which pressed upon every
one the insistent question, ‘Are you a Christian?”
The question would probably never have occurred
to Herbert, so much would it have been for him a
matter of course. To Watts, and even more to the
generation following, it was the universal question
of vital importance. The strength of the Church of
Rome lies in her utilization of those sides of human
nature in which choice is not directly involved,
which are appealed to by the institutions of religion.
Much of the strength of Protestantism lies in her

ISAAC WATTS 167

call to the will, to personal affirmation. This has
been a marked characteristic in that strong type of
personality which has been so prominent a feature in
Protestantism. Protestantism and individualism are
near of kin.

To these characteristics of Watts’s poetry must
be joined another —a certain love of beauty. The
assiduous study of nature had, as I said, not then
arisen. But Watts has an eye for the country land-
scape as he walks

Abroad in the meadows to see the young lambs

Run sporting about by the side of their dams,
With fleeces so clean and so white;

and he exclaims,

How fair is the rose! What a beautiful flower!
The glory of April and May!

He feels the calm of a summer evening:

How fine has the day been, how bright was the sun!
How lovely and joyful the course that he run,
Though he rose in a mist when his race he begun,
And there followed some droopings of rain!
But now the fair traveller’s come to the west,
His rays are all gold and his beauties are best;
He paints the skies gay as he sinks to his rest,
And foretells a bright rising again.*

But it is chiefly in his literary style that he shows
his eye for beauty, or perhaps we might rather say,
for form. Dr. Johnson declares of him: “He was one

Eilers Da gains

168 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

of the first authors that taught the Dissenters to
court attention by the graces of language. Whatever
they had among them before, whether of learning or
acuteness, was commonly obscured and blunted by
coarseness and inelegance of style.” * This verdict is
supported by a passage in a letter from Enoch
Watts to his brother Isaac, in which hessays: “A
load of scandal lies on the Dissenters only for their
imagined aversion to poetry.” Isaac Watts insists on
the importance of beauty and therefore of poetry,
and in poetry, of fit and beautiful expression. To
appreciate the innovating character of the following
passage we must remember that in his time poetry,
like novels, was regarded by the pious as “worldly”:

The profanation and debasement of so divine an art
has tempted some weaker Christians to imagine that
poetry and vice are naturally akin; or at least that verse
is only fit to recommend trifles and entertain our looser
hours, but it is too light and trivial a method to treat
anything that is serious and sacred. They submit, in-
deed, to use it in divine psalmody; but they love the
driest translation of the Psalm best. They will venture
to sing a full hymn or two at church in tunes of equal
dulness; but still they persuade themselves and their
children that the beauties of poetry are vain and dan-
gerous. All that arises above Mr. Sternhold is too airy
for worship, and hardly escapes the sentence of “un-
clean and abominable.” ?

® Lives of the Poets, ii, 453. 2 H. L., Preface, p. Ixxxii.

ISAAC WATTS 169

Felicities of expression are continually occurring
in his verse. Thus he says:

There’s nothing round this spacious earth
That suits my large desire.
(II, 10.)

His spirit would fly above, within the starry
heavens,

Beyond those crystal vaults
And all their sparkling balls;
They ’re but the porches to thy courts,
And paintings on thy walls.
Cie. p71)

Lord, when I quit this earthly stage,
Where shall I fly but to thy breast?
For I have sought no other home,
For I have learned no other rest.

(II, 100.)

In all my vast concerns with thee,
In vain my soul would try

To shun thy presence, Lord, or flee
The notice of thine eye.

O wondrous knowledge, deep and high!
Where can a creature hide?
Within thy circling arms I lie,
Beset on every side!
(Psalm 139.)

Thy words the raging winds controul,
And rule the boisterous deep;
Thou mak’st the sleeping billows roll,
The rolling billows sleep.
(Psalm 89.)

170 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

Lo, what a glorious sight appears

To our believing eyes!

The earth and seas are passed away,

And the old rolling skies.

His own soft hand shall wipe the tears

From every weeping eye,

And pains and groans and griefs and fears

And death itself shall die. \(I, 21.)

The similarity of thought in the lines beginning

My mind to me a kingdom is,

which, dating a century before Watts, are ascribed
both to Edward Dyer and to William Byrd, does not
take from the dignity and felicity of Watts’s “True

Riches”:

I am not concerned to know

What to-morrow fate will do;

’Tis enough that I can say,

I ’ve possessed myself to-day.

Then if haply midnight death

Seize my flesh and stop my breath,
Yet to-morrow I shall be

Heir to the best part of me.
Glittering stones, and golden things,
Wealth and honours that have wings,
Ever fluttering to be gone,

I could never call my own.

Riches that the world bestows

She can take and I can lose;

But the treasures that are mine

Lie afar beyond her line.

When I view my spacious soul,
And survey myself a whole,

And enjoy myself alone,

I’m a kingdom of my own.?

tH wiles De leas

ISAAC WATTS 171

The solemn dirge of the ninetieth Psalm is almost
as impressive in Watts’s version as in the stately
words of King James’s translators:

Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,

Our shelter from the stormy blast,
And our eternal home,

Under the shadow of thy throne
Thy saints have dwelt secure;

Sufficient is thine arm alone,
And our defence is sure.

Before the hills in order stood
Or earth received her frame,

From everlasting thou art God,
To endless years the same.

A thousand ages in thy sight
Are like an evening gone,

Short as the watch that ends the night
Before the rising sun.

Time, like an ever-rolling stream,
Bears all its sons away;

They fly forgotten, as a dream
Dies at the opening day.

Our God, our help in ages past,
Our hope for years to come,

Be thou our guard while troubles last,
And our eternal home!

When I remarked that Watts had a certain love
of beauty, I meant, as we generally mean by the

172 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

phrase, an uncertain one. His aim — let me say it
again — is ever homiletical; and not being interested
in pure beauty for its own sake, he can do violence
to it in ways which would be those of a ruffian if
they were not merely those of a preacher. Thus he
never lets imperfect rhymes stand in his way. He
rhymes “wing” and “begin” (II, 58.3), “not” and
“thoughts” (III, 6.1), “tune” and “throne” (III,
1.1), ‘‘bliss” and “trees” (II, 16.5), ““me” and “sea”
(I, 127.2). Of this last we may say, “But that is all
right.”” But according to the pronunciation of his
day, it was not, for the latter word was then pro-
nounced “‘say.’”’* When he is under headway he does
not pause to make his rhyming-scheme consistent.
Instead of “abab,” as in the rest of the hymn, he
puts in “‘abcb” (1, 108.1). He shows at times shock-
ingly bad taste, as for example:
Here we behold His bowels roll
As kind as when He died,
And see the sorrows of His soul

Bleed through His wounded side.
(III, 4. 6.)

t God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants His footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.
Cowper.

Here thou, great Anna, whom three realms obey.
Dost sometimes counsel take and sometimes tea.
Pope, Rape of the Lock,
Ill, 7.

ISAAC WATTS 173

And when our great-grandparents laid away their
loved dead, and the otherwise beautiful hymn,
“Why do we mourn departing friends?” rose to the
mournful wail of “China,” how painfully it must
have jarred to come to the third stanza:
Why should we tremble to convey
Their bodies to the tomb?

There the dear flesh of Jesus lay,
And left a long perfume.

(II, 3.)

He worked at the technique of his art, as his
work shows. His lines flow smoothly and swiftly,
without break. He never embarrasses the sense to
fit the metre. He is skillful in varying the cesura,
and in the use of lines end-stopped and run on. He
experimented with various kinds of verse, and the
result exhibits skill. Here he is wielding Sapphic
hendecasyllables:

When the fierce north wind with his airy forces
Rears up the Baltic to a foaming fury,

And the red lightning with a storm of hail comes
Rushing amain down,

How the poor sailors stand amazed and tremble!
While the hoarse thunder, like a bloody trumpet,
Roars a loud onset to the gaping waters,

Quick to devour them!

Such shall the noise be and the wild disorder

(If things eternal may be like these earthly),

Such the dire terror, when the great archangel
Shakes the creation.

SS ee D7As

174 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

But there is an appalling amount in his output.
One hundred and fifty Psalms, each in many cases
in several different metres — Long, Short, Common,
Particular — three hundred and sixty-five hymns,
thirty-six “Divine and Moral Songs,” two unas-
sorted books of hymns and lyrical poems — it is
enough to daunt the stoutest seeker for poetic gold.
Knowing that most of such a mass must be but.
dust, one wishes for a sifter to make a selection
from his poems, as Matthew Arnold did for Words-
worth. This indeed has been accomplished auto-
matically. The compilers of hymn-books have taken
what they found valuable and incorporated it in
their publications, and the bulk of this has been very
considerable. ‘“The Sabbath Hymn Book,” pub-
lished in 1858, contains two hundred and fifty-five
hymns by Watts. The number in more recent publi-
cations is less, owing to the change in popular the-
ology in the last half-century. But take almost any
hymn-book of the present day, and it willbe found
that Watts has contributed to it more than any
other writer.

I said that his hymns are not mere rhymed
theology, though they aimed to be theology — that
is, Calvinism — in rhyme. His God is the Hebrew
Jehovah unmodified. His theory of the Atonement
is bloody substitutionalism; his hell is material and
perpetual. But he aimed to do something more than
put Calvinism into verse; he aimed to give 1t emo-

ISAAC WATTS 175

tional value. And as we look over his most repellent
lines, we shall find almost all of them bathed in an
atmosphere of feeling and gaining a respect, a worth,
and often a beauty thereby. Yet while he accepted
the Calvinism of his day, a kindly heart compelled
him, as it has done so many others, to modify illogi-
cally its severities.

That spirit led him to declare his persuasion that
heathens and savages who never heard of the gospel are
not left to perish unavoidably without any hope or any
grace to trust in; but if there be found among them any
who fear God and work righteousness, they shall be
accepted of Him through an unknown Mediator, as
Cornelius was. It led him to entertain a curious opinion
concerning the souls of those who die in infancy. The
execrable notion that they are condemned to eternal
punishment for their portion of original sin, he utterly
rejected. ... Rather than condemn them to a wretched
resurrection for the purpose of being condemned, he
would have chosen to believe in a metempsychosis, and
that the soul on its early separation from one body
entered into another, in which it might go through that
state of trial on which its eternal destiny might equita-
bly depend. But in his judgment it was more likely, as
more consonant with Scripture, that they underwent in
its strict and final sense the penalty of temporal death
denounced against all the race of Adam, and that there
was no resurrection appointed for them.

t Southey, Life of Isaac Waits, in H. L., p. 39.

176 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

And this loop-hole he enlarged yet more favorably,
for he held that the infant children of the elect would
be regarded as part of their parents, and so exempt
from annihilation and accepted under the covenant
of grace. With all his picturesque location of heaven
and hell, he catches a glimpse of modern Broad
Churchism, and recognizes the destiny of the soul
as established automatically:

Perhaps it may be furnished with some new vehicle
of more refined matter; perhaps it may abide where
death finds it — in anywhereness or nowhereness, not
changing its place but only its manner of thinking and
acting and its mode of existence, and without removal
finding itself in heaven or hell according to its conscious-
ness of its own deserts.?

This kindness of heart obliged him to make a survey
for himself of the strait and narrow way and to
come to the following conclusion: “I am persuaded
there is a breadth in the narrow road to heaven, and
persons may travel more than seven abreast in it.”

One cannot claim for Watts a place in the first
rank of poets. He only occasionally steps into the
second rank. He is not likely to be among those
whom we take down from our shelves to read in the
half-hour when we crave to have the drab dulness
of ordinary life gilded with an inspiring glow. Yet
when we take his hand, he may lead us into the

* Southey, Life of Isaac Watts, in H. L., p. 55.
2 Ibid., p. 39.

ISAAC WATTS 177

domain of the eternal, and as we behold him kneeling
there in joy and awe, we become aware that we are
in the presence of God. He was the first Englishman
who set the gospel to music, and in his special field ©
of song he has never been surpassed.

V

PERPETUA AND FELICITAS

“?WANHE noble army of martyrs praise Thee!””— so

in all ages has sung, not only the Christian
Church, but the pious of every religion, as they con-
templated those who suffered for conscience sake.
For whether the beliefs for which they suffered were
or were not those of the beholder, the steadfast
giving of all has won respect and admiration from
persecutors as well as friends.

There is hardly a more moving story of martyr-
dom than is contained in “The Passion of the Holy
Martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas”; an account, the
historicity of which is confirmed by scholars, of the
deaths of two women and three men in North Africa
in the year 202 (or 203) A.D. That the women only
are named in the title may be owing to the unusual-
ness at this time of female martyrdom; indeed,
this was probably the first case then known to the
Church in Africa, though Blandina and her mistress
had suffered shortly before in the persecution at
Lyons and Vienne, and Agathonike at Pergamos.
But this account is in one respect unique. We have
often wished we could converse with the martyrs
before their end and learn how they regarded it.
That is what we do in this document. For it contains

PERPETUA AND FELICITAS 179

a journal written by Perpetua from the time of her
arrest up to the day before her execution, with a
short narration of a vision of his by Saturus, another
of the martyrs, while an eye-witness gives an account
of the execution itself.

The history is found in different versions in sev-
eral Latin MSS, whose text suggests that they have
all been taken from a Greek original. A document
which may have been such an original has recently
been discovered and edited by Dr. J. Rendel Harris.
The Greek text, together with a longer and a shorter
version of two Latin texts, has been published by
him in the Haverford College Studies, No. 3, while
a translation by Seth K. Gifford is published in the
same series of Studies, No. 4. A translation by Rev-
erend R. E. Wallis may be found in Appendix 5,
volume III, of the Ante-Nicene Fathers. -

Vibia Perpetua was a resident of the town of
Thuburbo near Carthage. She was of noble family
and good education, twenty-two years old, married,
and the mother of a boy, at this time apparently
less than a year old. Judging from a mosaic portrait
of her in the archbishop’s palace at Ravenna, she

must have been beautiful. Felicitas was her maid-
~ companion, that relation which we find common in
Shakespeare’s plays. She too was young and married,
and became a mother while in prison before her

* Copies of these mosaic portraits of Perpetua and Felicitas are
given by Dr. Harris in Haverford College Studies, No. 3.

180 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

execution. Their husbands are not referred to, which
may suggest that they were not Christians, or even
that it was they who first gave information against
the women. Together with the women there were ar-
rested three men — Revocatus, possibly a brother
of Felicitas, Saturninus, and Secundus. The last-
named died in prison before the games were cele-
brated, but his place was filled by the voluntary
surrender of Saturus, a deacon, who was absent
when the arrests were made. We are inclined to ask
why he should have given himself up when he was
apparently safe from the demands of the law. But
many of the early Christians regarded martyrdom
from a point of view opposite to ours. To us it is an
experience of dread, a necessary duty perhaps, but
to be feared and avoided whenever honestly possible.
To the early Christian it was an opportunity to be
coveted and eagerly seized, for it ensured not only
high honor in the Christian community but certain
entrance into heaven. What were a few minutes or
hours of bodily pain compared with seeing the shin-
ing gates of Paradise flung wide, and hearing the
“Well done, good and faithful servant”? So Sa-
turus, on his return from his absence, may well
have hastened to the authorities and denounced
himself, demanding to be included in the little band
for whom arrest was plainly known to mean death.
Before all of them was the sight of the great multi-
tude which the Seer of the Revelation beheld in

PERPETUA AND FELICITAS 181

heaven, when one of the Elders asked him, ‘“‘‘What
are these which are arrayed in white robes, and
whence came they?’ and I said unto him, ‘Sir, thou
knowest.’ And he said to me, ‘These are they which
came out of great tribulation, and have washed
their robes and made them white in the blood of the
Lamb....They shall hunger no more, neither
thirst any more,...for the Lamb... shall feed
them and shall lead them unto living fountains of
waters, and God shall wipe away all tears from their
eves.)

The technical charge against Perpetua and her
friends was refusing to burn incense in honor of
the emperor. Since the time of the first emperor,
Augustus, the divine right of kings had been estab-
lished in a form essentially the same as that which
it had in Europe in later centuries. While later
times, however, were content with asserting that
the king can do no wrong, Roman law declared
in addition that the emperor was divine by des-
cent. Beneath this apparently materialistic asser-
tion there was, moreover, a truth which enabled
the belief to survive for several centuries. That
which the Empire stood for, the stable order of
things, civilization, law, the peace of the world, this
was regarded as an embodiment of the genius of the
emperor, his spirit. How largely this was thought of
as personal it is difficult to say. But it was the bond

« Rev., vii, 13-17.

182 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

of Roman unity, loyalty to which was the duty of
every Roman citizen and subject. To refuse to ac-
knowledge this bond was therefore treason, and the
form of public acknowledgment which was adopted
was the burning of a few grains of incense on an
altar before the statue of the emperor. This was the
test which separated those Christians who cast the
incense into the fire from those who refused and
knowingly went to the beasts and the gladiator’s
sword. But why should they refuse? one may ask.
To burn a few grains of incense was a trivial act,
which left the rest of life untouched. Moreover, it
was external, it did not involve one’s inner attitude.
Could not one say, “This no more affects my real
self than waving a fan. I can be just as much a
Christian after it as before. Christianity is not a
gesture of the body but an attitude of soul. Christ,
my Lord, I can worship and follow still” ? Could not
one say that? Many a one did say it and relapsed
into safe oblivion here, leaving his full account to
be settled at the Day of Judgment. Perhaps they
were wise, as many of them were, no doubt, consci-
entious. But men give their real acclaims, not to
wisdom, but to heroism. Of those who listened thus
to the persuading arguments of their over-anxious
relatives, history has not preserved the names,
but it has carefully cherished the name of everyone
who turned his back on the altar and proclaimed
boldly, “Christianus sum!” For it is not the size of

PERPETUA AND FELICITAS 183

a test which counts, but its weight. If two parties
agree to call an act as trivial as tearing a bit of paper
a test, then its decision is as weighty and final as the
most thunderous sentence of a judge. There was in
reality a difference between a Christian and a pagan;
their ways, thoughts, ideals, loyalties were different.
To confuse a fact with the consequences of the fact,
to deny the fact because of its consequences, was not
only bad logic but soul-damage. “‘Can you call that
thing there anything but a pitcher?” asked Perpetua
of her dissuading father. “No,” said he. ‘Neither
can I call myself anything else than what I am, a
Christian.”

All the members of Perpetua’s family seem to have
sympathized with her except her father. He came to
see her several times after her arrest and besought
her with tears and denunciations and entreaties, for
the sake of his hoary head, for the sake of her child,
for her own sake, to recant and save herself from the
dreadful fate which awaited her. But she calmly
turned from him with his “devil’s arguments,” as
she called them, and when he gave up coming for a
while, she remarked with a touch of humorous satis-
faction, ‘Then I gave thanks to the Lord, and his
absence became a source of consolation to me.”’ She
is thoroughly feminine, this daintily bred girl, afraid
of the dark, repelled by the crowd and the closeness
of the prison, anxious for her child. The local church
contributed to their support while under arrest, and

184 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

two of their friends hired the jailer to transfer them
to a milder quarter of the prison and to permit her
to have her baby with her. Then the child, which
had drooped for lack of his mother’s nourishment,
revived; “And forthwith I grew strong and was re-
lieved from distress and anxiety about my infant
and the dungeon became to me as it were.a palace,
so that I preferred being there to being elsewhere.”

Reading this account, we are struck with the no-
bility of human character it reveals, the sturdy loy-
alty to conviction, the courage that rises to joy, the
triumphant dominance of the spirit over the body.
Yet to the author and those of his time these mar-
vels are not the chief attraction, nor probably the
chief motive of the writer in recording the history.
To him the centre of interest seemed “the more
eminent visions of the blessed martyrs, Saturus and
Perpetua, which they themselves committed to
writing.” Throughout the world of former times
visions had a significance which since the coming of
the scientific spirit they have largely lost. Wherever
dualism influenced thought, as almost everywhere it
did, the conviction was deep that God and man
were such opposites that what was divine was non-
human and what was human must be non-divine.
The result was not only that man must empty
himself of what was characteristic of him in order to
approach God, but that events in which no human
agency could be traced were regarded as directly

PERPETUA AND FELICITAS 185

divine. Visions and dreams were therefore prized as
especially significant, since they were immediate
communications from God and marks of peculiar
favor to those to whom they were vouchsafed. So
St. Paul, in going over his credentials as an apostle,
enumerates his Hebrew descent and the hardships
and sufferings he has undergone in the Christian
service. But this, he says, is after all a fool-way of
counting, which is “not expedient’; he will come
to the real thing, to visions and revelations of the
Lord. And then, with the confused utterance with
which a man must always try to express his deepest
experiences, he tells of one or more visions which he
had had, which were so wonderful and precious that
there was danger that he should be “exalted above
measure through the abundance of the revelations.””*
The belief in the significance of dreams is still preva-
lent to-day. In early ages they were regarded as
almost the sole avenue of communication from God,
except in case of those especially favored persons
whom He endowed with the insight of prophecy. It
was long after the days of St. Paul and Perpetua
that the discovery that God speaks to men through
the channels of ordinary life became the common
property of Christian thought, although the Psalm-
ist had thrown out this wealthy knowledge centuries
before. “How precious are thy thoughts unto me,
O God!” he exclaims, “how great is the sum of

t 2 Cor., xii, 1-8.

186 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

them!” The following verse seems to indicate that
he has in mind particularly the dreams which are
God’s well-known means of communication. Yet
these are not for him the sole means, for even in the
daytime he and God are together: “When I awake
I am still with Thee.”*

But to Perpetua and her friends dreams and
visions are of profound significance and comfort.
While she is in prison her brother suggests that, as
she is now so highly honored as to be within sight of
probable martyrdom, it is likely that her request
might be granted if she should ask for a vision
to tell her whether the result would be in fact a
martyrdom. She accepts the suggestion, and is so
confident that a vision will be vouchsafed, that she
promises to give him the intelligence to-morrow.
And the next day she does; it is to be —in the lan-
guage of the early Church — a passion.

This was not her only vision. But before another
came, there came a tremendous reality. One day,
while they were at dinner, they were summoned to
the office of the proconsul, and there, after refusing
to sacrifice, they were condemned to the wild
beasts. After which, she notes, “With joy we went
down to the prison.” Other comforting visions now
followed; one in regard to a brother of hers who
had died young and for whose welfare in the other
world she yearningly prays, and one in which she

t Psalm 139, 17-18.

PERPETUA AND FELICITAS 187

fights with a huge negro and overcomes him, and
so has confidence that in the amphitheatre she will
overcome her spiritual enemy.

Where that amphitheatre was, is not certain. So
small a town as Thuburbo is not likely to have had
one. Mention is made of the party of martyrs being
previously taken to a camp of soldiers; but in regard
to that the same unlikelihood would hold. The prob-
ability is that the exhibition took place in Carthage,
especially as it was intended to be, not a mere exe-
cution, but a high festival in honor of the emperor’s
birthday. As we walk to-day among the ruins of
Carthage we may therefore legitimately see Per-
petua and her friends entering the arena.

About fifty years before this time there had ap-
peared in Phrygia Montanus, a Christian reformer.
He was the first of that long series of those whom
the Church sooner or later declared to be heretics,
whose main tenet was that Christianity must be a
religion of the spirit. This involved not only the
claim of its leaders to inspiration but the corollary
that ecclesiasticism with its priests and its ritual was
useless and even harmful. If every one could be in
continual communion with God, what was the need
of intermediaries? While the Church emphasized the
worship of Christ, Montanism emphasized the wor-
ship of the Holy Spirit. Its influence was now spread-
ing through the Christian world, particularly in
Africa. Tertullian of Carthage, the first great writer

188 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

of Latin Christianity, became interested in it. He
had been ordained a presbyter by the church in
Carthage, and was married, a fact which afterwards
caused scandal to Church historians. He had visited
Rome, and found conditions there quite different
from those which Christian morality and the life of
the spirit required and on which Montanism laid the
stress of importance. He was now, in 202 A.D., prom-
inent in the church at Carthage and in warm sym-
pathy with Perpetua and her friends, who were
Montanists. Very probably addressed to these was
a tract, “Ad Martyras,” which he put out about
this time. And it was about this time also that he
himself became a Montanist and the passionate and
brilliant champion of that movement. It is not im-
probable that the stirring scene in the amphitheatre
may have been the final argument of convincing
weight which led him to set his face against what he
regarded as a degenerate form of Christianity.

In his tract “Ad Martyras” he exhorts “the
Blessed Martyrs Designate” to fill their minds with
the thoughts of things above, and then their prison
conditions will be of trifling importance; nay, more,
they will be felt as a gain.

Wherefore, O blessed, you may regard yourselves as
having been translated from a prison to, we may say, a
place of safety. It is full of darkness, but ye yourselves
are light; it has bonds, but God has made you free. Un-
pleasant exhalations are there, but ye are an odor of

PERPETUA AND FELICITAS 189

sweetness. The judge is daily looked for, but ye shall
judge the judges themselves. Sadness may be there for
him who sighs for the world’s enjoyments. The Christ-
ian outside the prison has renounced the world, but
in the prison he has renounced a prison too. It is of no
consequence where you are in the world — you who are
not of it. And if you have lost some of life’s sweets, it is
the way of business to suffer present loss that after-
gains may be larger....Let us drop the name of
prison; let us call it a place of retirement. Though the
body is shut up, though the flesh is confined, all things
are open to the spirit. In spirit then roam abroad; in
spirit walk about, not setting before you shady paths
or long colonnades, but the way which leads to God.
As often as your footsteps are there in spirit, so often
you will not be in bonds. Where thy heart shall be,
there will be thy treasure.'

Perpetua’s journal is so human, so vivid and mov-
ing, that it may not be superfluous to give it in full.
It is as follows:

While we were still under watch my father attempted
to persuade me, for the sake of his affection for me, to
renounce my proposed confession. And I said to him,
“Father, do you see that household utensil lying there?”
and he replied, “I do.” “Can you call that thing there
anything but a pitcher?” “No,” he said. “Neither
can I call myself anything else than what I am, a
Christian.” Then my father, provoked at my words,
rushed at me as if he would tear my eyes out. But he

t Ad Martyras, chap. 2.

190 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

only cried aloud and went away vanquished, carried
away with his devil’s arguments. Then, while he was
from home for a few days, I gave thanks to the Lord
and his absence became a source of consolation to me.
In the meantime we were baptized; and I was prompted
by the Holy Spirit to ask nothing from the water of
baptism except patient endurance of the flesh.

After a few days we were cast into prison, and I was
very much afraid. How dreadful a day! for never had
I seen such darkness and excessive heat. For the prison
was crowded with a multitude of people, chiefly on ac-
count of false accusations of the soldiers. Besides all
these things, I was distressed on account of my infant
child. Then Tertius and Pomponius, blessed deacons
who ministered to us, arranged by paying gratuities that
we should be transferred to a milder quarter of the
prison. Then all went out and attended to their wants;
I suckled my child, which was now enfeebled with hun-
ger; I talked with my mother, I cheered my brother, I
commended to them my child. But I was consumed with
grief because I saw them grieving on my account. Such
solicitude I suffered many days. But I obtained leave
for my child to remain in the prison with me; and then
I grew strong and was freed from distress and anxiety
about my child, and lo! the prison became to me a
palace, so that I preferred to be there to being elsewhere.

Then my brother said to me, “My dear sister, you
are already in a position of great dignity, and are such
that you may ask for a vision, so that you may know
whether this is to result in a passion or an escape.” And
I, who knew that I was privileged to converse with the
Lord, whose kindnesses I had found to be so great,

PERPETUA AND FELICITAS IgI

boldly promised him and said, “To-morrow I will tell
you.” So I asked, and this was what was shown me. I
saw a ladder of brass of marvellous size, whose top
reached up even to heaven, but so narrow that persons
could only ascend it one by one. And on either side of
the ladder there were fixed swords and spears and hooks
and knives and spikes of every kind, so that, if one
went up carelessly without looking, he would be torn to
pieces and his flesh would stick on the points. And at
the foot of the ladder was a dragon, exceeding great,
lying in wait for those going up and terrifying them so
that they might not dare to ascend. But Saturus went
up, for he voluntarily surrendered himself on our ac-
count, not having been present when we were taken
prisoners. Now when he came to the top of the ladder,
he turned and said, “Perpetua, I am waiting for you;
but be careful that the dragon does not bite you.” And
I said, “Nay, in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, he
shall not hurt me.” And as if the dragon feared me, he
quietly presented his head at the foot of the ladder, and
as I trod upon the first step I trod upon his head. And
I went up, and I saw a very great garden, and in the
midst of the garden a white-haired man of exceeding
great stature, sitting in shepherd’s dress, milking sheep.
And many thousands stood about him, in white rai-
ment. And lifting his head, he beheld me and said, “ Wel-
come, my daughter.” And he called me, and as he was
milking he gave me a little cake of cheese, and I received
it with folded hands and ate it, and all who stood around
said, “Amen!” And at the sound of their voices I awoke,
still tasting a sweetness which I cannot describe. And
I related the vision to my brother, and we perceived

192 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

that it was to be a passion, and from that time I ceased
to have any hope in this life.

After a few days we learned that we were to have a
hearing. My father also arrived from his long journey,
worn out, and coming to me urged me to abandon my
confession, saying, “Have pity, my daughter, on my
gray hairs, have pity on your father, if indeed I am
worthy to be called father by you. Remember that with
these hands I have brought you up to this flower of your
age and preferred you to all your brothers. Do not bring
shame on me in the sight of men. Have regard to your
brothers, have regard to your mother and your mother’s
sister, have regard to your son, who will not be able to
live after you. Lay aside your courage and do not bring
us all to destruction, for none of us will ever speak
freely again if any harm should come to you.”

So said my father in his affection, kissing my hands
and throwing himself at my feet, and with tears he
called me, not Daughter, but Lady. And I grieved at
my father’s state, that he alone of my whole family did
not rejoice at my suffering. And I comforted him, saying,
“At the judge’s tribunal whatever God wills will happen,
for be sure that we shall be not in our own power but
in that of God.” And he departed from me in sorrow.

Another day, while we were at dinner, we were sud-
denly hurried away to our hearing; and when we had
come into the market-place, at once a report went about
the neighboring parts and there ran together a very
great crowd. And when we came to the tribunal, the
others were examined, and confessed. And as I was
about to be examined, my father appeared with my boy
and drew me aside and said in a supplicating tone,

PERPETUA AND FELICITAS 193

“Sacrifice, out of pity for the babe!”’ Then Hilarianus,
the procurator, who had just received the power of life
and death in place of the proconsul Minucius Timinia-
nus, who had died, said, “Spare the gray hairs of your
father, spare the infancy of your child; offer sacrifice for
the welfare of the emperors.” And I replied, “I will not
sacrifice.” Hilarianus said, “Are you a Christian?” and
I answered “I am a Christian.”

When my father kept trying to seduce me from the
faith, Hilarianus ordered him to be put out, and some
of the guards beat him with their rods. And it grieved
me as if I had been beaten myself, for I pitied his
wretched old age. Then the procurator condemned us
all to the beasts, and with joy we went down to the
prison. Now since the child was fed at my breast and.
was accustomed to stay with me in prison, I sent Pom-
ponius the deacon to my father to ask for the babe.
But he refused to give it up. Yet, as God ordered, the
child from that time did not desire the breast, nor did
my breast cause me trouble, in order perhaps that I
might not be troubled both by anxiety for the child and
pain in the breasts.

After a few days, while we were all praying, suddenly,
in the midst of our prayer, I cried out and called the
name of Dinocrates. And I was surprised, for that name
had not come into my mind until then, and it saddened
me to remember his end. But knowing that I was worthy
to make a petition for him, I began at once to pray to
the Lord for him mightily and with groanings. And im-
mediately that very night there was shown to me this
vision. I saw Dinocrates coming forth from a dark place,
where there were also many others burning and parched

194 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

with thirst, his raiment foul, his countenance pale, and
the wound on his face which he had when he died. For
this, Dinocrates, my brother according to the flesh, had
sickened and died when he was seven years old, his face
mortified with gangrene so that his death was loathsome
to all. I saw now between him and me a great space, so
that neither of us could approach the other. And in the
place where my brother was, there was a fountain filled
with water, but its rim was higher than the boy could
reach. To this Dinocrates was stretching up, trying to
drink. And I grieved because, though the fountain was
full of water, the child was unable to drink on account
of the height of the rim. And I awoke, and knew that
my brother was in distress; but I trusted that my prayer
would bring help to his sufferings, and I prayed for him
every day until we were transferred to the other prison,
that of the tribune, for it was near the camp where we
were to fight with beasts. For Cesar’s birthday was
about to be celebrated. So I prayed earnestly for my
brother day and night, groaning and weeping that he
might be granted to me.

Then in the evening, while we remained in the stocks,
there was shown to me this vision. I saw that the place
where I had seen Dinocrates was now bright, and Dino-
crates was refreshed and in beautiful raiment with his
body clean, and where the wound had been I saw a
scar; and the rim of the fountain, from which water was
flowing continually, was brought down to his waist,
and upon the rim was a golden cup full, and Dinocrates
came and began to drink from it, and the cup did not
become empty. And when he was satisfied, he went
away from the water and began to play joyously after

PERPETUA AND FELICITAS 195

the manner of children. Then I awoke, and understood
that he was delivered from the place of punishment.

After a few days Pudens, a soldier, who had charge
of the prison, began to regard us with much esteem, per-
ceiving that the great power of God was in us, and he
admitted many brethren to see us, so that they and we
were mutually refreshed. And when the day of the exhi-
bition drew near, my father came to me worn with grief
and began to pluck out his beard and throw himself on
the ground, and lying on his face, to reproach his years
with such words and accusations as might move all
creation. And I grieved for his unhappy old age.

The day before that on which we were to fight, I saw
in a vision that Pomponius the deacon came to the gate
of the prison and knocked vehemently. And I went out
and opened it for him. He was clothed in shining rai-
ment, his loins girded, and many-colored sandals on his
feet; and he said to me, “‘Perpetua, we are waiting for
you; come!” and he held out his hand to me, and we
began to go through rough and crooked places, and with
difficulty came to the amphitheatre. And he led me into
the midst of the arena and said, “Fear not; I am here
with you and will share your struggle.” And lo! I saw
a very great throng gazing eagerly upon the spectacle.
And knowing that I had been condemned to the wild
beasts, I wondered that they were not let loose upon
me. Then there came forth against me an Egyptian,
horrible in appearance, with his backers, to fight with
me. And there came to me a youth most fair in form,
radiant with beauty, and with him other beautiful
youths, to help and support me; and I was stripped and
became a man, and my assistants began to rub me with

196 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

oil, as is the custom in contests; and on the other hand
I beheld the Egyptian rolling himself in the dust. Then
came forth a man of wonderful size, so that he even
overtopped the top of the amphitheatre, and he wore
a loose tunic and a purple robe with two bands over the
middle of the breast; he had also many-colored sandals
of gold and silver, and had a rod like a judge or trainer
of gladiators and a branch with golden apples. He com-
manded silence and said, “If this Egyptian conquer this
woman, he shall kill her with his sword; but if she shall
conquer him, she shall receive this branch.” Then he
withdrew, and we advanced against each other and
began to deal out blows. And when my adversary tried
to seize my feet, I kicked him and smote him in the face.
And lo! I was lifted up in the air and began to strike
him as if I were not treading on the ground. But seeing
that I did not even yet hurt him, I clasped my hands so
as to lock my fingers together, and seized his head and
hurled him face downwards, and I trampled on his
head. Then all the throng began to shout and my sup-
porters to exult, and coming to the judge I received the
branch, and he kissed me and said, “‘ Daughter, peace be
with you!” And we began to go with applause to the so-
called Gate of Life. Then I awoke, and perceived that
my approaching conflict was to be, not with beasts, but
with the devil. And I knew I should conquer him. These
things I have written up to the day before the exhibition.
What shall take place in the amphitheatre, let him de-
scribe who will.

Here ends the journal. There is now nothing to
do but wait for the morrow, calmly, confidently,

PERPETUA AND FELICITAS 197

triumphantly. But before the exhibition Saturus also
has a vision. It is now all over, the beasts and the
more savage shouting throng, and the martyrs are |
borne upwards into heaven. There, as they recog-
nize friends and martyrs who have gained glory be-
fore them, while they bow before the throne of God,
Saturus turns and says, “‘ Perpetua, you have what
you have wished’; and she said to me, ‘Thanks be
to God that, joyous as I was in the flesh, I am now
more joyous’; and we were all fed by an indescrib-
ably sweet odor which satisfied us. Then I joyously
awoke.”

Joyousness! it is the wonderful, triumphant note
which runs throughout the whole history. There is
more; there is even mirth. For as they are sitting at
their last meal, curious crowds press in to gaze at
them. But they laugh at the curiosity of the people
and Saturus says to the gazers, “Is n’t to-morrow
enough for you? Look at our faces carefully so that
you may recognize them at the Day of Judgment.”
And when the jailer is inclined to skimp their fare
for fear they may poison themselves through the
connivance of friends, Perpetua says to him, “Why
don’t you allow us to get strong? Is n’t it to your
credit, the fatter we come to the arena?” How many
a one to-day who is facing a surgical operation with
the blessing of anesthetics and the promise of re-
newed health, goes to the operating room without
a tithe of the calmness and cheer with which these

198 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

martyrs faced the arena! For “the day of their
victory shone forth, and they went out from the
prison to the amphitheatre as if to heaven, glad
and radiant in countenance, their hearts beating
with joy rather than with fear.” Perpetua followed
“with placid look and with step and gait as a ma-
tron of Christ, casting down the lustre of her eyes
from the gaze of all.” She sang psalms while the men
exchanged words with the spectators. As they passed
before the seat of the procurator who had been their
judge, they shouted at him, “Thou us, and thee
God!” This enraged the crowd, who demanded that
they should be scourged; and as the whips fell, they
rejoiced that thereby their kinship with their Lord’s
sufferings was more fully established.

When the beasts were admitted, they were slow
to attack and the spectacle languished. Saturus and
Revocatus were teased by a bear, and when a wild
boar was brought up against them, it turned upon
its keeper and wounded him so that he died the next
day. Then Saturus was bound and laid on the ground
close to the cage of the bear; but the animal refused
to leave its cage. Perpetua and Felicitas were strip-
ped of their clothes and led in. But this stirred in the
multitude some sense of shame and protesting mur-
murs, so that they were withdrawn and brought in
dressed in underclothes but with nets wrapped
around them, rendering them helpless for defence.
Then a savage cow was turned loose upon them.

PERPETUA AND FELICITAS 199

Perpetua was tossed and fell on her side; but when
she saw that her tunic was torn and left her body
exposed, she sat up, fumbled for a pin, and, woman-
like, pinned the rent together. Then she bound up
her hair; for it was not becoming for a martyr to
suffer with hair disheveled, lest in her glory she
should seem to be mourning. Meanwhile Felicitas
had been tossed, and Perpetua went to her and
lifted her up. The crowd now clamored that this was
enough for them, and they were led toward the gate
of exit. And while standing here, Perpetua, rousing
herself from a daze or an ecstasy of spirit, said,
“When are we to be thrown to that cow?” and
when she was told what had happened, she could
not believe it until her own wounds and the rents
in her dress were pointed out to her. She then
turned to her brother and a friend who was with
him — for they were allowed to speak to the pris-
oners — and said, “‘Stand fast in the faith and love
one another, all of you, and don’t be dismayed by
my sufferings.”

The intermission was not a pardon; it was only
a short reprieve. For while they waited there, Satu-
rus said to one of the soldiers who guarded him, “I
have not been touched by any of the beasts, but I
hope I shall be destroyed by one bite of the leopard.”’
It was as he wished; for he was immediately thrown
to the leopard, which with one bite drenched him
with so much blood that the spectators derisively

2900 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

called it a baptism and shouted, “Washed and
saved, washed and saved!”

But the exhibition could not end without the
death of the martyrs. So as the beasts had refused
to be executioners, the professional gladiators were
called in. When the condemned group heard what
was next to be required of them, they. walked of
their own accord to the middle of the arena, that the
whole populace might see. Standing there, they all
kissed one another, recalling the kiss of peace with
which the worship of the Christians was always con-
cluded, and then awaited the thrust of the gladiator’s
sword. When the executioner came to Perpetua, his
hand fumbled, either because he was unskilled or
because he was unmanned by her beauty and her
bearing, and his sword barely pierced her ribs.
In her pain she cried out, and seized his hand
and brought it to her throat, where it finally did its
office.

Here ends the touching and inspiring history. But
the author must break out into a panegyric on the
heroic men and women whose triumphal progress he
has been narrating:

“OQ most brave and blessed martyrs! O truly
called and chosen unto the glory of our Lord Jesus
Christ! How shall we extol or bless you, most noble
soldiers! Surely if ancient writings are read to the
edification of the Church, not less worthy to be read
is the all-virtuous course of the blessed martyrs,

PERPETUA AND FELICITAS 201

that it may testify to the continual operation of one
and the same Holy Spirit even until now — those
blessed martyrs through whom we ascribe glory to
the Father of the worlds, together with His only
begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, with the Holy
Spirit, to whom be the glory and the power for ever
and ever. Amen.”

VI

MANI AND DUALISM

the year 276 a.p. there was crucified in Persia
a man whose religious ideas were destined pro-
foundly to affect Christendom. That man, Mani,
had been oppressed by the self-contradictory nature
of the world. It was not merely the fact that he found
the world neither bad nor good but both. Many a
common man before him had seen that. But while
the common man had thrown his belief upon the one
side or the other, Mani declared that this dualism
was in the nature of things, and eternal. Yet he was
not sufficiently a Hegelian to understand the prin-
ciple of the union of opposites. The opposites into
which he divided his universe remained distinct each
from the other, and consequently there was only
warfare between them — a warfare which was eter-
nal. Manicheeism inherited much of the theology of
Zoroastrianism; it agreed with it in holding matter
to be essentially evil, the kingdom of Ahriman; in
which light, the kingdom of Ormazd, is imprisoned.
Its struggles to be free constitute that world-pulse
which is the condition of things we see. Asceticism,
therefore, the suppression of the body and its de-
sires, is the holy path for one who would seek union
with the Divine.

MANI AND DUALISM 203

This sharp division of the world between the two
opposing forces furnished a problem by no means
ancient only. A small boy, theologically inclined, of
our own day put the question thus: “If all the good
in me is God’s, and all the bad in me is the devil’s,
where do I come in?” This young Manichee did not
know that he was tugging at the greatest of all hu-
man problems, the problem of personality.

In the views of Mani just mentioned there was
little that was original. But they were an upswelling
instance of that dualistic thought which was even
then age-old. Manichzeism summed up ideas which
had long been current, and rendered them attractive
by its stern moral demands and by the martyrdom
of its founder. It penetrated Western Christianity,
and for nine years claimed St. Augustine as one of
its disciples; and though the Church endeavored
time after time to suppress it, it appeared among
the Bogomiles, the Cathari, the Albigenses, possibly
the Waldenses, and other sects which the Catholic
Church denounced as heretical, and persecuted. Its
influence upon orthodoxy, however, was far greater
than that of any of these sects; for it strengthened an
antithesis which theology had established long be-
fore. That the divine is the non-human, the human
the non-divine, is a conviction which goes back to
very early ages. As soon as men began to reflect
upon God, it was His otherness that struck them.
The chief thing about Him was His difference from

204 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

themselves; whatever they were, He was not. They
were limited; He was infinite. They were weak; He
was mighty. Will, with them, could accomplish
little; will, with Him, was omnipotent and wholly
arbitrary. This perception of the transcendence of
God, as it came to be termed, was most important,
for it was the first step in the recognition of a God
at all. Out of the undistinguished welter of things
came a perception of the difference between light
and darkness, and men, like God in the Hebrew tra-
dition, saw the light, that it was good. They looked
off to a Being infinite, omnipotent, eternal, and
found in Him something greater than themselves,
something durable in the flux of time. He was far
beyond and above them; and this lifting of the eyes
was the precious first step in soul-development.
But because God was beyond and above, He was
far distant. A gulf separated men from Him. They
could not get at Him; He was inapproachable. And
unless there was some connection between Him and
them, what was the use of having Him? He must be
brought somehow into relation with human affairs;
not so much He with them — for power over men,
of course, He had — as they with Him. They must
be able to touch Him, even if it were but the hem of
His garment. So intermediaries were conceived who
should bridge the gulf — mediators, media of com-
munication, messengers, angels. These were re-
garded by the Gnostics as emanations, portions of

MANI AND DUALISM 205

the Divine thrown out, as it were, by the Absolute.
They then might become independent, much as the
Deists of the eighteenth century regarded the laws
of nature. These angels, messengers, were the means
by which God was kept informed of the doings of
earth, and men could present their case in heaven;
though the angels sometimes needed a ladder, such
as Jacob saw, to get from the one place to the other.

That again was a great step, when God was
brought into touch with humanity. Even though it
necessitated special times, special places, special
agents, which were not always at hand, still God was
approachable and apprehensible, and that was of
infinite worth. Meanwhile there was growing the
conviction that God liked goodness, truth, justice, up-
rightness, better than their opposites; and gradually,
very gradually, these, rather than temples made with
hands, came to be thought of as the meeting-place
between man and God. This was the severe and in-
finitely precious lesson which the Hebrews learned
during the Exile. It could not be, they thought, that
they had left their God behind in Jerusalem. He
must in some way be with them still. Their prophets
assured them that this was the case, and that God
Himself proclaimed it so: “I dwell in the high and
holy place; but with him also that is of a contrite and
humble spirit.’”’* “I will put my law into their in-
ward parts and write it in their hearts.”? And in their

t Isa., vii, 15. 2 Jer., Xxxi, 33.

206 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

distant Babylonian home they ventured to take the
comfort of it, and since they were cut off from offer-
ing sacrifice and incense, they prayed God to take
the will for the deed: “Let my prayer be set forth
before Thee as incense, and the lifting up of my
hands as the evening sacrifice.’’?

Here then, in man’s higher nature, was a region
into which he could go and always find God. But
this was surely not a kind of neutral ground, into
which the parties came from opposite sides. Love,
truth, wisdom, goodness, these were more than
rooms for conversation. They were personal; they
could not be conceived as other than aspects of per-
sonality. So, a century or two before the Christian
era, wisdom was depicted as a personal companion of
God: “The Lord possessed me,” they heard wis-
dom declaring, “in the beginning of His way, before
His works of old; then I was by Him, as one brought
up with Him, and I was daily His delight, rejoicing
always before Him.”? A century or two after the
Christian era the personalization was completed.
Love, goodness, wisdom, truth were no longer re-
garded by clear Christian thinkers as abstract qual-
ities or companions of God; they were aspects of
God Himself. It was not merely, God has love, but
“God is love, and he that dwelleth in love dwelleth
in God.” 3

This was the great discovery of the first Day of

t Ps, 141, 2. 2 Prov. vill, 22, 30. 3 1 John, iv, 16.

MANI AND DUALISM 207

Pentecost. A multitude of differing people found
themselves saying the same thing, filled with the
same spirit. It was the spirit of devotion to their
master Christ, and therefore was the same spirit
which animated him. And suddenly it flashed upon
them that the spirit of Jesus was Jesus himself.
Dead though he was, he was with them in a form as
truly personal, as truly himself, as when he walked
the fields of Galilee and the streets of Jerusalem; yes,
even more truly, for now, as he had said, this spirit
would be with them always and their joy no man
could take from them. It came to be the distin-
guishing mark of a Christian that he had received
the spirit; and the spirit was not something which
might ultimately bring them to the Lord, but the
Lord, said St. Paul, is the spirit.”

Of course there were many and earnest Christians
in the first century, such as the authors of the Syn-
optic Gospels and St. James, who were incapable
of rising to this wealth of apprehension of their Mas-
ter. To them he was a being external to themselves,
whose memory they revered, whose commands they
followed, but wholly external and therefore in the
past. For those who saw more deeply, Christ had
gone within and become part of the soul’s very being.
The Pauline theology and that of the Fourth Gospel
are filled with this thought of the identification of
the life of the soul with the very presence of Christ.

= 2 Cor., iii, 17.

208 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

Christ is not only an objective historic being who
once lived and died, but he is the subjective principle
of life within the soul. In him, in God whom he rep-
resents, we live and move and have our being. The
hope of glory is Christ within you.

This intimacy of union is unintelligible to one who
tries to apprehend it as theology only. But to one
who recognizes the conditions of daily life as inter-
pretive of eternal processes, it becomes gloriously
illuminative. To exhibit such union the best magni-
fying glass is marriage, where this close relationship
speaks in the happy voice of the truly married hus-
band or wife.

Dualism’s method of uniting the human and the
divine is quantitative. A certain amount of the hu-
man in one side of the scales displaces just so much
of the divine on the other side. This is commercial-
ism in a region in which commercialism is impos-
sible. But the union between God and man must
rather be qualitative. If we were to choose a word
for the method, it would perhaps be “‘interpenetra-
tion.” And in order to discover what that is, we
should turn to the instances of it by which we are
surrounded. The thought of one mind flows into
another, not by displacing an equivalent bulk there,
but by penetrating it, so that it becomes interwoven
with the mind invaded, while at the same time it
belongs as fully to the individual owner. So the

5 Cola dy oye

MANI AND DUALISM 209

whole range of the personality of one passes into,
fills, and becomes part of the personality of another.
So close we dwelt, we hardly stood apart.
Before one spoke, subtly the other heard,

As hand serves hand without the need of word
In quick response, as pulse keeps touch with heart.

It was such a union which Jesus desired that his
disciples might have with him: “That they all may
be one; as Thou, Father, are in me and I in Thee,
that they also may be one in us. All mine are Thine
and Thine are mine; J in them and Thou in me, that
they may be made perfect in one.” * Such a thought
emphasizes the misuse of the passage, according to
which Jesus is supposed to be’ setting forth the im-
portance of corporate unity, as it is called, of having
but one ecclesiastical institution. But the union he
desired with his disciples was to be like that between
him and his Father, which was certainly not insti-
tutional. His words here refer to a union the very
opposite of that contemplated by those who use
them as an authorization of their demand for church
uniformity.

The line between different stages of being is
everywhere difficult, sometimes impossible, to draw.
Just where is the dividing line between the plant
and the animal? between the animal and the human
being? between a man and his friend? between the
soul and God? Such lines are like the geographer’s

t St. John, xvii, 10, 21, 23.

210 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

parallels and meridians, which must be imagined for
the convenience of the student but which have no
real existence. Long before the theory of evolution
had pointed out this abolition of distinctions in kind,
St. Paul saw and rejoiced in its higher developments.
“Ye are Christ’s, and Christ is God’s.”’* It is to his
mind the glory of the situation that theré is a clear
line running straight without break from every hu-
man soul through Christ to God. Man’s humanity
shades into the humanity of Jesus, and Jesus’ hu-
manity shades into his divinity, and his divinity
shades into the divinity of the Godhead. This con-
stitutes a bond between man and God, and gives
each a need of and an essential hold on the other.
It was during the second, third, and fourth cen-
turies, when Christian thinkers were discussing espe-
cially the relations of Jesus to God the Father, that
the old problem of dualism, in spite of St. Paul and
the Fourth Gospel, held them most closely in its
grasp. How could the chasm between finite and in-
finite be crossed? how had it been crossed in the work
of creation? how were spirit and matter related?
how did evil enter the world, and what was evil?
Since spirit was the higher, it must be that the ma-
terial, the natural, was evil, with which the spiritual
man could have nothing to do. This fundamental as-
sumption of the essentially evil nature of matter is,
by the way, exactly contrary to the conclusion to |

1 Cor,, iil, 23.

MANI AND DUALISM 211

which science seems now tending — namely, that
matter is a form of mind. Modern thought seems
justifying us in saying that, as God has only His own
substance out of which to create, He is forever form-
ing the world out of Himself by an act of transub-
stantiation, and saying, “Take, eat; this is my
body.” But Hebrew religion in its moments of clear-
est insight set itself against dualism. The creation,
it declared, was not the work of an inferior deity,
but both worlds, those of spirit and of matter, were
called into being by one and the same infinite God.
“Tn the beginning God created the heaven and the
earth.”! The prophet of the Exile was so daring that
he did not hesitate to solve the dualistic problem by
declaring Jahveh to be the author of evil itself: “I
form the light and create darkness; I make peace
and create evil. I, the Lord, do all these things.” ?
The prosaic mind of the ecclesiastical chronicler,
however, accepted the ordinary dualistic opinion as
the more pious. King Asa, he says, was diseased in
his feet; ‘Yet in his disease he sought not unto the
Lord but to the physicians.” The chronicler adds
significantly, ““And Asa slept with his fathers.”
Yet in spite of the Hebraic rejection of dualism,
it was impossible for the early Church to conceive
the relation of Jesus to God on other than a dualistic
basis. Starting from the same ground,— the essen-
tially evil nature of matter, — two opposite schools

* Gen., i, I. 2 Isa., xlv, 7. 3 2 Chron., xvi, 12, 13.

212 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

of thought arose. The one, that of Cerinthus, held
that Jesus, as the true son of Joseph and Mary, was,
like his fellow-men, tainted with sin, though more
righteous than others. The Divine Logos was at his
baptism joined with him; and these two continued
together in the human body of Jesus until at his
death he cast off his flesh and became pure spirit.
Dualism was thus seated in the very person of
Christ. The other school, that of the Docetists, de-
nied altogether the fleshly — that is, evil — nature
of Jesus, and maintained that he was human in ap-
pearance only, having no real human nature but a
wholly spiritual one. This too established a dualism
in Christ, through the failure of the different ele-
ments in him to constitute a unity. Round this
problem thus insoluble— to keep Jesus in touch
with humanity, to assert his freedom from the taint
of sin, and to proclaim at the same time the differ-
ence between human and divine and the inherent
evil of the haman—over and about this impossible
problem the currents of thought flowed for centuries
hopelessly. The Church itself, though combating
the heresies in this respect, was not more successful
in freeing itself from the limiting premise of dualism.
The Symbol of Chalcedon aimed to clear up the
matter, but left it thus: “Our Lord Jesus Christ,
consubstantial with the Father according to the
Godhead and consubstantial with us according to
the Manhood ... to be acknowledged in two na-

MANI AND DUALISM 213

tures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, in-
separably; the distinction of natures being by no
means taken away by the union but rather the prop-
erty of each nature being preserved and concurring
in one Person and one Subsistence.” This asserts the
end desired but does not show how it can be reached.
Ideas, speculations, fancies, from sources Christian,
Jewish, Oriental, classical, magical, all combined in
the many and strange systems which came to be
known as Gnosticism. Dualism stamped itself deep
upon orthodox Christianity, and it came to be taken
for granted that there was a necessary opposition
between faith and reason, grace and nature, super-
natural and natural, the priest and the man, the
Church and the world.

Such opinions could not remain speculative only.
They involved a denial of that which to the author
of the Johannine Epistles was life’s most precious
possession — the conviction that Jesus was the au-
thentic revelation of the infinite God. For such a
denial gave birth to a disbelief in any ultimate stand-
ard, and this resulted in antinomianism and im-
morality, and to a disregard of the corporate nature
of religion, which then became gross selfishness. One
who can see Jesus Christ and yet not welcome in
him the ideal of God and man, can do so, in this
author’s view, only by denying his own moral per-
ceptions. And so he bursts out into the exclamation

which is the central thought of all his Epistles, “Who

214 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

is a liar but he that denieth that Jesus is the
Christ?” ?

No intelligible thought of the Incarnation was
possible as long as human and divine were regarded
as opposite factors which must somehow be made to
combine, though, like oil and water, each persisted
in retaining its separateness. It was only-when men
came to meditate on the penetrative power of per-
sonality — how mine becomes thine and thine
mine — that they came to understand how God
could mingle with man and flow into him and how
man could breathe-in God, and yet each be fully
himself. Only then is divinity seen to be humanity
raised to its highest power and Jesus to be essen-
tially human and essentially Divine. Because he was
very man of very man he was very God of very
God. The manner of his birth therefore has nothing
whatever to do with his divinity; whether it was
after the common course or was exceptional, is
wholly irrelevant. A virgin birth is not necessarily
excluded, but the question has no importance. It is
important only as a support to the view that divin-
ity is apart from humanity. Even here the doctrine
of the Virgin Birth is of course ineffective; for in
order to cut the connection with the sinful humanity
of Adam’s race there would be necessary, not only
the absence of a human father but the existence of
a mother whose every ancestor had been free from

t x John, ii, 22.

MANI AND DUALISM 216

the entail of Original Sin. The Roman Catholic
Church has been logical in propping the doctrine of
the Virgin Birth with the decree of the Immaculate
Conception of the Virgin; but it has been utterly
illogical in stopping there and not continuing its
expurgations back through her genealogy to Adam.

To suppose that a virgin birth is necessary to
Christ’s divinity is to assume that divinity is a
quality of matter. Yet just as we recognize the will
as the centre of each human being and the essential
nexus binding him to others, so we must see in Jesus
his will as the essential and ultimate bond between
him and God. “TI seek,” he said in announcing his
ultimate purpose, “the will of the Father which
hath sent me.”* “I came to do the will of Him that
sent me.”? And this unity with God which was his
unfailing support and his guide, is fenced in by those
two utterances of his, the one as he looked forward
to life, the other in the crisis of its ending: “Wist ye
not that I must be about my Father’s business?’’s
and “Father, not my will but Thine be done!’’4 It
is this absolute unity of will with God which we
must regard as constituting the divinity of Christ;
which therefore needs no materialistic prop such as
is supposed to be furnished by a non-human mode
of birth. If the relation between Jesus and God is
akin to the closest relation between two human be-

* St. John, v, 30 2 Ibid. vi, 38.
3 St. Luke, li, 49. 4 [bid. xxii, 42.

216 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

ings, then indeed he becomes, as the early Christian
seer called him, “the mediator of a new covenant,’’?
and God becomes gloriously apprehensible as we
see “the light of the knowledge of the glory of God
in the face of Jesus Christ.’”?

The danger has been pointed out of dwelling
exclusively on the thought of the Divine.transcend-
ence — that it tends to remove God into inappre-
hensibility, till He becomes an unknowable x. There -
is a similar danger in dwelling exclusively on the
thought of the Divine immanence. Faulty logic may
assert, “If God is in all things, then all things are
God.” Distinctions vanish, among them the funda-
mental distinction between good and evil. It is not
only east of Suez that the best is as the worst, but
here all about us are those who proclaim that there
is no such thing as sin, though there may be at times
inconvenience. “Animals,” says Walt Whitman,
pointing to them as a model, “animals are not
troubled about their sins.” This gospel of Pantheism
destroys all difference between higher and lower in
human character, leaving only the urge of desire as
the motive to be heeded. This makes oneself the only
being to be considered, and — unless one is extra-
ordinarily prudent — the self of the present moment
only. Personality therefore decays. God of course
has gone long before.

It is plain from what has been said that we must

Heb., xii, 24. a'o Cors, iv, 6:

MANI AND DUALISM 217

hold to both the transcendence of God and the im-
manence of God, and that, in order to avoid a
blighting dualism, we must recognize these as not
separate but as integral parts of each other. As em-
phasis, however, is laid on the one side or the other,
different ethical standards result. Where God is
chiefly regarded as transcendent, man’s highest vir-
tue is subordination. What God desires from man is
obedience. If the Divine is the non-human, it is not
man’s development that will bring him near to the
Divine but his contraction. Familiar examples of
this meet us in every age—in the self-tortures of
medieval ascetics; in the stern Puritan endeavor
to repress love to friends in order that love may
be directed to God alone; in the Quaker emptying
of self that God may enter; in the chorus of the
revivalist,
O to be nothing, nothing!
Only to lie at His feet
A broken and empty vessel,
For the Master’s uses meet!

This idea reaches its logical development in Mo-
hammedan countries, where the insane and idiotic
are regarded as especially near to God and inspired.
It has its prominent exponent in modern times,
curiously enough, not in a theologian or philosopher,
but in a social reformer, Rousseau, with his ideal-
ization of the primitive savage and the state of
nature. We find it also in his follower, Wordsworth,
whose interest is so largely in the untaught, in

218 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

“Peter Bell” and “The Idiot Boy,” and especially
in children.
Heaven lies about us in our infancy.
Shades of the prison-house begin to close
Upon the growing Boy.
But he beholds the light, and whence it flows

He sees it in his joy.
a °.

At length the man perceives it die away,
And fade into the light of common day.

Throughout the ancient world dreams were, for
this reason, regarded as direct communications from
God. Where the human will is wholly absent, it must
be the Divine which prevails.

On the other hand, where the Divine immanence
is emphasized, a broken and empty vessel is re-
garded as not so meet for the Master’s use as a
whole and full one. The more complete the man, the
nearer he comes to God. His highest virtue is not
obedience, but harmony of will with God. Let him
develope all his powers. Let him will indomitably,
let him think fearlessly, let him love passionately;
so doing, he will be more in the image of God and
therefore more pleasing to Him than one who
crouches at His feet in self-abasement. “Son of
man,” said the Divine voice to the prophet who had
fallen low upon his face at the presence of the Lord,
“Stand upon thy feet, and I will speak to thee.”

t Ezek., ii, 1.

MANI AND DUALISM 219

Throughout the ages this thought of the essential
antagonism between human and Divine has affected
the Church’s view of the relations between man and
God. In regard to that central doctrine of religion,
the sovereignty of God, for example: if human and
Divine are mutually exclusive, the will of God must
be conceived as a command imposed on man from
without. Obedience to this is rewarded and disobe-
dience punished by arbitrary decrees, by conditions
not in the nature of the case, which consequently
might, if God so chose, be other than they are. But
if humanity is one in kind with the Divine, God’s
will and man’s will may be the same, in such insepa-
rable union as we found exemplified in a closely mar-
ried couple. The will of God then comes to the man
not so much from without as from within, as the
nature of things, as the voice of his own nature and
will; or, rather, this points the way to a still further
development and closer union, to that which, ac-
cording to the early English version of the Psalms,
the poet called, with a splendid double superlative,
“the Most Highest.” The breaking of this coinci-
dence of wills is sin. Merdvova, a change of attitude,
restores the union, though it does not necessarily
save from the consequences of the sin. God and man
are, however, again at one. This union, through the
union of wills, becomes, when translated into theo-
logical language, justification by faith.

In like manner, if human and Divine differ in de-

220 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

gree rather than in kind, natural and supernatural
must blend. Nature, the condition of things which is,
is being constantly moulded into what ought to be.
But oughtness is not in impersonal nature as such
but is essentially personal. It 1s, so we say, above
nature. Whenever then personality directs for its
own ends the laws of nature, we might call this
supernatural; but because we are so continually
doing this, we reserve the term for the unusual, the
apparently inexplicable instances of this agency, and
call these alone supernatural. Yet this loose usage
must not blind us to the fact that the supernatural
is really the personal, and is therefore ultimately a
part of nature, or rather nature is a part of it.

So too revelation may mean a body of truths once
imparted from heaven, or a continually widening
process of discovery. The late Dr. George F. Sey-
mour, Bishop of Springfield, Illinois, states the for-
mer view clearly:

There are two realms of truth, revelation and science.
The Church, as regards the subject-matter of revelation,
is not a searcher after truth. She already holds the truth
as God’s gift to her, and it is her highest duty to guard
it and hand it on, as St. Paul says, “as she received it.”
The Church, as God’s accredited teacher of faith and
morals, would contradict her own claim as speaking with
authority if she were to allow for one moment that she
is seeking after truth. I plead guilty to the charge that
in the realm of revelation, the sphere of God’s gift, I
am not a seeker after truth. [And again:] For man there

MANI AND DUALISM 221

are two realms of truth, revelation and science. God
rules in the one absolutely; man is permitted to rule in
the other. Revelation is God’s direct gift to man. Science
is man’s acquisition. In the realm of revelation I am not
a seeker after truth; in the realm of science I am a seeker
after truth.

Bishop Seymour undoubtedly never perceived
that this is Manicheism; nor that such dualism is
always atheistic, in that it hands over to man one
province of life and thought without a God in it;
nor that it is what churchmen of his school would
call ‘“‘rationalistic,” since the boundaries of the two
realms must certify themselves to the human intel-
ligence or reason. If the human mind is competent
to assign data to the one realm or the other, or if it
is capable of apprehending the Divine assignment,
why is not this capacity sufficient for determining
the character of each datum as it is presented, that
is, for knowing? To know that there are two realms
is itself knowledge. To distinguish the Divine voice
assigning its place to any datum involves the use of
that very “private judgment”’ which the existence
of a realm of revelation is supposed to supersede.
It is as if, in order to save walking, we get a canal-
boat to carry us, and then make our journey leading
the towing horse.

Of course, it follows that thought, or reason, and
faith are not antithetic but are parts of each other.

* Danger Signals, p. 18.

222 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

Reason carries the process of thinking as far as it
can go, and faith then draws the conclusions, as yet
invisible but probable beyond, and throws all her
weight upon them. The one part of the process is as
divinely appointed and approved as the other.

The sacred and the secular also therefore blend.
These are convenient names for the moreness or
lessness of divinity, or, perhaps I should say, for the
greater or less apparentness of divinity, in a universe
which is one. In what we call sacred, God stands out
visible through the removal of common things; in
the other case, He and His are so common as to be
unnoticeable. And as neither side disqualifies the
other, so the leading figures in each are different
not in kind but only in function. The priest is not
an abnormal or magically created man, but properly
one with a special sense of God and the trained
power of making Him apprehensible to humanity.
His ordination as priest does not create but, like all
true ecclesiastical functions, confirms and estab-
lishes authoritatively that which already exists. The
baptismal office does not make one a child of God;
it officially recognizes him as such. The wedding
service does not make the marriage; that must have
been begun previously and continued in the making
through life. The burial service does not make a man
dead; it only definitely declares him to be so. And
thus the service of ordination, while through its in-
spiration it may awaken new powers, does not make

MANI AND DUALISM 223

the priest different in kind from the man, but estab-
lishes him as a specialist in the visualization to hu-
manity of God in some of His common aspects.

Or again, since creation must be regarded as the
work of God, the view of human and Divine as anti-
thetic lends itself to the idea that His activities, His
word, His plans for humanity, are static, that is,
that they took place some time in the past and then
continued unchanged, or that they are tending to a
goal which will some day be reached and will then
become unchangeably fixed. Did the creation of the
world take place ages ago at a certain point of time?
or is evolution the account of a continual creation?
Was inspiration a monopoly of men of former cen-
turies? or does God speak to-day in the same ways
in which He spoke to men of old? Is heaven a static
condition to be reached after death, where there is
no further change? or is the pulse of life eternally
dynamic, with development ever on and on toward
an ever-flying goal? If the human is the non-divine,
God will undoubtedly take care that we shall not
come too near Him; but if divinity is humanity
raised to the mth power, then we may believe the
words of Jesus to be authoritative, possible of ac-
complishment, and comforting: “Be ye perfect, even
as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.”

How all these dualistic difficulties vanish if we
regard the universe as organic! An organism is a

1 St. Matt., v, 48.

224 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

whole, each part of which is necessary to it and to
the other parts. A particular stone in a basketful is
not necessary; any other stone would do as well.
But eye and hand and heart and brain are all nec-
essary to the human body, and each implies the
others. So every organic universal must have its par-
ticulars, which both give to it and receive from it
completion. Two is a small number; but the universe
would fall in ruins if two and two should cease to be
four. The particular is as necessary to the universal
as is the universal to the particular. So the human,
far from being non-divine, is essential to the divine.
As truly as man needs God in order to be his fully
developed self, so truly does God need man for His
infinite glory; nay more, He needs not only generic
man but the individual me. He and IJ are so closely
joined that neither could exist without the other.
See this set forth in its extreme form with the logic
of high poetic imagination:

Ich weiss dass ohne mich Gott nicht ein Nun kann leben;
Werd’ ich zu nicht, Er muss von Noth den Geist aufgeben.

Ich bin so gross als Gott; Er ist als ich so klein.
Er kann nicht itiber mich, ich unter Ihm nicht seyn.

So sings the seventeenth-century mystic, Angelus
Silesius:
Apart from me I know God cannot live a minute;
Should I leave life, He too could not continue in it.

God is as small as I; I am as great as He.
He cannot above me, nor I beneath Him be.

* Der Cherubinischer Wandersmann, I, 8. 10.

MANI AND DUALISM 225

“But can the Infinite be subject to limitations?”’
Certainly, if these are self-limitations. Limitations
imposed on me from without, I may rebel against as
constituting subordination to another’s will. But if
I take these limitations and adopt them into myself,
they become my own will, and so not hindrances to
my development but means to it. I am, so far,
Causa met; | have used my finiteness to become, so
far, infinite.

This great principle then, that the infinite does
not exclude the finite but finds it essential to itself,
enlightens all life and thought, from the flower in
the crannied wall to the being and character of God.
It reveals the Why of creation, the complex nature
of God, the reasonableness and necessity of the
Trinity, that union of human and Divine in Christ
Jesus which prophets and creed-makers desired to
see. It gives confidence to the prayer of humble
access, and to him who without one reassuring
glance builds on his Heavenly Father with unthink-
ing certainty. If the infinite excludes the finite, we
must be forever blind gropers in the dark toward a
goal which forever eludes us. But if Divine and hu-
man are not antithetic, then we are, as the apostle
triumphantly declares, “heirs of God, joint-heirs
with Christ.”’ And to the possessors of such bound-
less wealth, what matters anything else!

Vil

A COMPARISON OF THE SYNOPTIC, PAUL-
INE, AND JOHANNINE CONCEPTIONS
OF JESUS

“N

We often have a tendency, in the complex
life of the present, to regret the apparently
simpler life of the past; to long for the carefree irre-
sponsibility of childhood, or for the unconventional
habits of an earlier society, or for the glow and en-
thusiasm of our former Christian faith. The attempt
at recall is, of course, always futile, and the picture
of past conditions as we reconstruct it is almost al-
ways erroneous. The Golden Age is not behind but
before. Similarly there is a tendency in the student
of the life of Christ to regret the days when there
was one authoritative portrait of Jesus, and when
a harmony of the Gospels, arranging all, or nearly
all, their incidents into a consistent whole, seemed
entirely possible. But those days are, for the student
of the New Testament, irrevocably gone. Here, as
elsewhere, he will, if he is wise, recognize present
conditions as steps in development and, with hope-
ful confidence, labor to discover the wealthier
knowledge to which they lead.

That the New Testament contains not one por-
trait of Jesus but several, and that these differ from

CONCEPTIONS OF JESUS 207

one another in important respects, this is the start-
ing point of our problem, which is to describe the
three different views — for they all belong to three
main types — and to consider the relation of these
to one another. In doing so I shall take the Gospels
and Epistles in the main as they stand, without at-
tempting textual criticism, and shall use for con-
venience the names appended to them as those of
the authors, without questioning their historicity.
In the Synoptic Gospels we find the first concep-
tion of Jesus; not the first in time but the first in
christological development. It can be seen most
characteristically in the Gospel of Mark. It is com-
paratively simple of thought, not analytic, not theo-
logic. There is an atmosphere about it which is
fresh, glad, young. We can see the blue lake spark-
ling in the morning sunshine, and the golden fields
of Galilee, rich with lilies and vocal with birds. It is
concerned with facts ungarnished, unrelated to any
scheme of thought. The utterances of Jesus in it are
significant and profound, but there is in them no
touch of mystery; they say little about his nature
or his relation to man or God. The bond between the
disciples and their Master is one of personal devo-
tion, in part an almost childish dependence, and in
part the reverent loyalty of a religious enthusiast
for his prophet. They turn to him for the solution
of their practical questions: how to get a withheld
inheritance or a desired office, how to pray, and —

228 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

most difficult of problems! — how to forgive. They
were, and they remained, devout Jews; only to the
current Judaism they added a recognition of Jesus
as the Messiah, the observance of his precepts, and
the expectation of his second coming to establish
that Kingdom of God for which both Judaism and
Christianity were waiting. During the lifetime of
Jesus it all centred around the content of the mes-
sage which he caught from the lips of his predecessor
and with which he began his own work: “Repent,
for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” His disciples
were occupied with the Lord’s parables and rules of
conduct, with discovering surprising fulfilments of
prophecy, and with discussing perplexing questions
of apologetics which their new position forced upon
them. Jesus had pointed to a spiritual essence in the
Law underlying its ritual demands, and to a right-
eousness which exceeded that of the scribes and
Pharisees; but their relation to the Law seems
never to have been considered by his immediate dis-
ciples; it had to wait for its development in the next
age by the great thinker of Christianity. As their
faith grew after the crucifixion into primitive Chris-
tianity, the puzzle of their Master’s death almost
absorbed their grief for it, while the expectation of
the Parousia became more vivid and exigent. When
and how it would occur, they knew not, only it
would be soon, in their lifetime.

™ St. Matt., Iv, 17.

CONCEPTIONS OF JESUS 229

The Synoptic conception, we may say then, is of
Jesus of Nazareth, a historic being, whom the au-
thors or others had seen and walked with in Galilee
or Judzea, whose words and deeds had become of
central importance, a man of such attractiveness
that loyalty to him became a dominant power in
those who drew near to him. They felt in him the
authority of one who knew God and man at first
hand, and who dwelt with eternal things. Therefore
he had originality; therefore he spoke boldly, and
his word was with power. His confidence in his
vision of God and in his success based on it were
invincible; but together with this inflexibility of
moral attitude there was a large loving-kindness
which went out toward men, women, and little
children, and all wondered at the gracious words
which proceeded out of his mouth.

I said thatin the Second Gospel there is no touch of
mystery; but that is not the case with the other two
Synoptic Gospels. While they share in the main the
comparatively incomplex view of Jesus, touches of
mystery cannot be kept from creeping in. Apart from
the mystery connected with a few of the miracles
attributed to him, there are one or two utterances
ascribed to him by Matthew and Luke which are
widely different in tone from those practical direc-
tions for conduct and those deepened interpretations
of duty and God which form the greater part of his
recorded discourses. Notably there is Matthew x1,

230 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

27, repeated in Luke x, 22: “All things are delivered
unto me of my Father; and no man knoweth the
Son but the Father, neither knoweth any man the
Father but the Son, and he to whom the Son willeth
to reveal him.” That might have come not from the
Synoptists but from the Fourth Gospel, its tone is
so like that profound underlying keynote of the
Johannine writings, “I and my Father are one.” In
its distinct expression of the relation of Jesus to God
this utterance stands almost alone in the Synop-
tists; though we hear a somewhat similar note in
the words ascribed by Matthew to Jesus in his final
charge to his disciples, “All power is given unto me
in heaven and in earth,”* and again in the passages,
different in tone but tending in this direction, in
which Jesus is described as the final judge of the
world. In the picture of Jesus drawn by the Synop-
tists, says Professor J. H. Ropes, ‘“‘a certain mystery
is an integral and essential element, which cannot be
separated out as having been added by a legendary
accretion.” ?

There is another possible indication that this tone
of mysticism was in the original words of Jesus and
was not added by later writings. The Fourth Gospel
declares that Jesus said, “I am the Way.” 3 If that
was in fact an utterance of his, it would be an exhi-
bition of the spiritual Christ rather than the historic

* St. Matt., xxviii, 18. * The Apostolic Age, p. 237.
3 St. John, xiv, 6.

CONCEPTIONS OF JESUS ST

Jesus. Now this phrase, ‘“‘the Way,” came to be, in
the apostolic age, according to the Book of the Acts,
the common term for the Christian movement. Saul
went to Damascus to see if he could arrest any be-
longing to “the Way.” * “The Way” was opposed
by the Jews in Ephesus.? The procurator Felix was
well posted with regard to “the Way.” 3 We find
then the word with this signification in common use
about the middle of the first century; but this usage
seems to have disappeared, for we do not meet it
afterward, and a half-century later “the Way” has
come to be applied to Jesus himself as being the
means of communication between man and God.
This appears contrary to the regular order of logical
development. We should expect that the use of the
phrase as a name for Jesus would come first, and
then it might naturally be applied to the movement
inaugurated by him. The reverse process seems illogi-
cal — to take the name of a society and apply it to
its founder. But if Jesus in fact uttered the words,
the usage would be explained; the name which he
gave himself came naturally to be used as that of
his society. Either the Johannine usage was the first
and that of the Acts second, which would be pre-
sumable, or that of the Acts was first and the Johan-
nine second, which would be strange. It seems likely,
therefore, that the Fourth Gospel is correct in at-
tributing these words, “I am the Way,” with their
transcendent tone, to Jesus.

t Acts, ix, 2. 2 Acts, xix, 9. 3 Acts, xxiv, 22.

232 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND: MARTYRS

This Synoptic conception of Jesus, simple though
with threads of mystery interwoven in it, could not
be adequate to meet the demands of inquiring in-
telligence or an expanding world. It must itself ex-
pand; and this, Jesus said, could be only through
his departure. Then his followers would be com-
pelled to think and act for themselves on the founda-
tion he had built for them. ;

Shortly after his death there came an event, ac-
cording to the Book of the Acts, which definitely
changed the relation of the disciples to their Master.
On the Day of Pentecost, somehow, in some way,
they were seized with the conviction that he was
not dead but alive. For some of them, no doubt, this
implied merely the transference in imagination of
his former material existence to a different, a heav- _
enly sphere; but to those of deeper insight it was
the discovery of what is meant by spiritual presence.
Loving souls of all time have felt that, when their
minds are filled with a dear one who has gone, when
they are living in the ways in which he lived, think-
ing his thoughts, holding his ideas, pressing heart to
heart, they are thus communing not merely with
the memory of him but with his spiritual presence;
not with him as a ghostly revenant, but with those
currents of his spiritual being which were of the
essence of his true life. While this is not his corporeal
presence, it is as truly, even more truly, his real
presence. This conviction came to the disciples of

CONCEPTIONS OF JESUS 233

Jesus on the Day of Pentecost, and it changed the
sphere in which their Master was present with them
from an external to an internal one. It formed thus
the transition from the Synoptic conception of Jesus
to that which was at the basis of the Pauline and
Johannine conceptions.

Yet Paul seems to have received his conception of
Jesus, not from that of the Synoptists but in another
way. He has few sentences showing an influence of
Jesus’ language as reported in the Gospels. He says
that he had formerly known Christ “after the flesh.”
It is possible for this to mean merely that he had
seen Jesus and was acquainted with his history.
This was probably the case; for it would have been
strange for one who had been a student in Jerusalem,
as Paul was at the time when the authorities were in
conflict with Jesus, not to have seen him and known
of the affair. But the phrase probably means that
his conception of Jesus had been a superficial one,
occupied with historic events and unaware of their
profound bearing on the relations between man and
God. Certainly he shows in his Epistles little interest
in the history of Jesus before his redemptive death.

* The only events previous to the Last Supper to which he refers
are the Davidic descent of Jesus (Rom., i, 3; ix, 5; xv, 12); his lowly
condition and poverty (Phil., ii, 7; 2 Cor., viii, 9); his unselfishness
(Rom., xv, 3); possibly a part of the first charge to the twelve apostles
(cf. 1 Cor., ix, 14 with Matt., x, 10); if he is correctly reported by

the author of the Acts, the preparatory ministry of John (Acts,
xill, 24, 25); and one of Jesus’ remarks not elsewhere preserved (Acts,

XX, 35).

234 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

He insists strongly that he borrowed his idea of
Jesus from no one, but that it was wholly original:
“I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was
preached of me is not after man. For I neither re-
ceived it of man nor was I taught it, but by the
revelation of Jesus Christ.”’ * It must, of course, have
had some basis in historic events, but if seems to
have diverged from the Synoptic contemplation of
the ministrations of Jesus to men and to have fol-
lowed rather the thought of his relation to God in
redemption.

It is that word ‘“‘redemption” which is the key to
Paul’s theology. When we try to trace the steps of
his thought and assess them as rational, we are
confronted by ideas which seem irrational and un-
Christian. This is partly because he had still in
mind conceptions belonging to Saul the Jew, which
Paul the Christian had not outgrown, and partly
because we are enjoying the fruitage of larger Christ-
ian conceptions, of which he was sowing the seeds
uhawares; but his view of the process of redemption,
however explained, we shall find based on the great
fundamental laws of man’s spiritual life, which are
as true for us as they have been in all time.

The most earnest endeavor of Saul, the young
Pharisee, was to be right — “‘justified”’ he called it
—in the sight of God, and this of course could be
me by keeping the Law. The more he tried, how-

“Galea, ti iyi

CONCEPTIONS OF JESUS 235

ever, the more impossible it became. Suddenly it
flashed upon him, What if this infinity of minute
demands did not exist? What if they were to be met
in another way? What if they had been met? If they
had, then he was free from them. In the same instan-
taneous flash came the conviction that Jesus, whom
he had fought against, was the Messiah. But he, the
anointed one, God’s own Son, was of course above
the Law and free from it, though he had gained this
freedom while experiencing human conditions. Paul
puts in a single word the key to Christ’s exaltation
and hangs it up on a “Wherefore”; for after enu-
merating the lowly conditions through which Jesus
triumphantly passed he says, “Wherefore God hath
highly exalted him.” * Now if he, Paul, should pass
through the same experiences, he would attain the
same blessed result; and this, if Jesus became his
Master, he could do, for then, following the steps of
his Lord with loving devotion, he would become one
with him; he too would be baptized with consecra-
tion to God, he would die to sin, and this would
mean that he too would ascend and rise into newness
of life. Becoming thus joined to Christ by passing
through his experiences, he would share his fortunes
hereafter. Again he puts his keynote into a word or
two. If God commended his love to us through the
death of Christ while we were sinners, much more
shall we be saved now that we are justified; if the

= Phil., ii, 9.

236 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

death of Christ brought us near to God, much more
shall we be saved by his life.t There is many a
trembling soul that has laid itself down with Paul
in confidence upon his “much more.”

There was, however, another side to the trans-
action. How could he, how could even Christ, obtain
freedom from demands which were just?\How was
it possible for God to lay aside these demands? The
debt incurred through sin must be paid. How could
God with justice give free way to His forgiving love?
But again Paul’s answer came: it was through the
death of Christ. He nowhere traces completely the
connection which he finds between Christ’s death
and the possibility of God’s forgiveness, but he as-
sumes and reiterates it. The Cross was an offering
on the part of Christ, on the part of humanity which
he represented, which made free forgiveness possible.

Here many a thoughtful Christian has stumbled
and parted company with Paul; for the conception
which seems to underlie the apostle’s thought, of sin
as a debt for which a vindictive God must exact the
uttermost farthing of payment, is abhorrent to him
and contrary, as he must believe, to the conception
of God as set forth by Jesus Christ. Viewing Paul’s
thought thus, we may see in it only a remnant of
Judaism and even of paganism — a savage deity re-
fusing to be appeased except by a bloody sacrifice.
Yet we may pierce deeper, and, without asserting

* Rom., v, 8, 9.

CONCEPTIONS OF JESUS 237

that our explanation is precisely that of Paul, we
may trace the law of redemption until it leads us to
the Cross of Christ; for redemption inevitably in-
volves suffering, and it was foreseen long before
the Christian era that suffering for righteousness has
a saving power not only for the sufferer but for all
who come within the range of its influence. The
Prophet of the Exile had declared of the servant of
the Lord, “Surely he hath borne our griefs and car-
ried our sorrows. The chastisement of our peace was
upon him, and with his stripes we are healed.” Of
the Maccabean martyrs it was said, “They came,
as it were, a vicarious expiation for the sins of the
nation, and through the blood of those godly men
and their atoning death Divine Providence saved
afflicted Israel.” * We do not have to turn to the
Scriptures for evidence of the vicarious and redeem-
ing power of suffering, for it is intelligible to every-
one who has tried to rescue from sin one whom he
loves. He has found himself plunged by love into all
the fortunes of the sinner; himself, though innocent,
suffering punishment with and for the guilty. He
knows that this fellow-suffering constitutes the most
potent appeal and the ultimate agency for the sal-
vation of the sinner, and he gladly pours out his
life-force, his life-blood, as a ransom.

The power which uplifts the world is will for
righteousness. This may be viewed as a great fund

t Isa., lili, 4, 5. 2 IV Macc., 17, 22.

238 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

supplied not only by the will of God but by con-
tributions from the wills of individual men. The
more of such contributions there are, the greater is
the power in the hands of God available for the
establishment of the kingdom of righteousness. So
too, we may believe, there is a fund of suffering nec-
essary for the redemption of the world? Every act
of suffering in a good cause, insignificant though it
may seem, is not lost, but goes to swell that fund,
making it more potent for the world’s redemption.
The existence of such a fund is not demonstrable
but belief in it is an imperative demand of the soul,
and evidence for it is eagerly and hopefully sought
by every sufferer, who would endure with proud sat-
isfaction, if only his agonized question could be con-
vincingly answered, “What profit is there in my
blood when I go down into the pit?” *

The conception of such a fund, potent for redemp-
tion, may throw light on the position Paul assigns
to the Cross of Christ as being at once the means of
drawing the sinner to God and therefore of making
it possible for God to come close to the sinner. Sal-
vation, to be complete, must secure deliverance from
the guilt of sin and from its power. The guilt of sin,
its opposition to God’s law, ceases when the oppo-
sition ceases, though even then the punitive conse-
quences of past sins may remain. The power of sin
is broken and the man kept from falling when he is

t Psalm 30, 9.

CONCEPTIONS OF JESUS 239

uplifted through shame and love into fellowship with
the redeeming agency. Being cleansed thus from the
guilt of sin and from its power, he becomes a one
with God.

We are inclined to suppose that the work of
Christ in establishing an atonement has its effect
wholly upon men. What need is there, we ask, of
propitiating God, of urging him to be willing to par-
don and receive sinners? He is more than willing
already. It is not God who needs to be reconciled to
men, but men to be reconciled to God; the work of
Christ can have effect upon men only. Yet rather,
we should say, upon men primarily; for while it is
true that God stands ready to welcome and receive
every sinner who repents, yet He is kept at a dis-
tance by an unrepentant and opposing will, and is
able then to impart not so much Himself as certain
of His benefactions only — such sun and rain as just
and unjust can receive alike. When, however, the
sinner’s attitude is changed, by that fact God’s atti-
tude too is changed, and it becomes possible for His
love to flow out unhampered by human barriers.
Christ’s work then, while having its primary result
in bringing men to God, has as a secondary result the
bringing of God to men. What it changes is not the
nature of God’s heart, but theconditions under which
alone that loving heart can manifest its nature;
for no righteous will can act or feel toward an evil
will in the same way as toward a good one. There is

240 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

more than a figure of speech in Paul’s term “wrath,”
taken from the Old Testament, for the attitude of
God to sin. Until one repents, forgiveness must be
incomplete. It is only when forgiveness meets re-
pentance that it can have its longed-for complete-
ness; only then that the sinner can be free from
“wrath” and be — in Paul’s phraseology — “justi-
fied”’; and such change is possible only through that
firm hold on eternal realities which Paul calls faith;
through the recognition of Jesus as the representa-
tive of God and a passionate loyalty to Christ, who
now becomes the motive power of the soul. The
transformation of the believer’s moral nature alters
not only the status of the soul in its relation to God
but the relation of God to the soul.

This may help to an understanding of those
phrases which are likely to give offence to modern
readers of the Pauline theology, phrases such as
“propitiation,” Christ a “sacrifice to God,” “being
made a curse for us,” “redemption through the
blood of Christ.” Such expressions seem to point not
only to a change in the attitude of God to men, but
to unworthy motives for the change. Undoubtedly
such phrases take their form more naturally in a
mind brought up, as was that of Paul, in a system
in which bloody sacrifices formed an essential part;
but these expressions are only the casual clothing
of his profound thought, and even with him such
figures of speech are much less frequent than we are

CONCEPTIONS OF JESUS 241

inclined to suppose, while his main emphasis 1s on
the effect of Christ’s redeeming work upon men.
The Renaissance of the fifteenth century was
grounded upon the assertion of the rights and the
worth of the individual. Paul may be said to be
in this respect the prophet of the Renaissance; for in
his view religion is not involved with membership
in a nation, much less in a church, nor in case of the
individual is it a product of heredity and education,
but it is essentially a response of the soul to God.
Luther called attention to the pronouns of the Bible.
It is not “God will save men” but “I will save
thee.” This feeling of a direct and intimate relation
between God and man turns Paul’s gaze within and
fixes his eyes upon the processes of development
going on in the individual soul; and it is this that
colors his use of the term “Christ.” I said that he
shows little interest in the events of the life of Jesus;
but his pages are studded with the name “Christ”’;
it flashes upon us, directly or indirectly, from almost
every thought. It has passed with him, however,
from a title of Jesus of Nazareth to a designation of
the ideal man, the embodiment of all that is best in
humanity, the expression of the possibilities of the
soul of the individual and of the race. “Christ”
stands with him for the human side of God and
therefore for the divine side of humanity. He uses
the phrase “Son of God” infrequently and “Son of
Man” not at all; but they are both combined for

242 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

him in the word “Christ.” For example, he says that
God’s dear Son is “the image of the invisible God,
the first born of every creature.’ * Again, he longs
to attain the resurrection of the dead, which, he
says, he has not already attained — a remark which
would be superfluous if resurrection meant to him
a reéndowment of life in a future state. But he will
attain this, or, as he more fully defines it, he will
become perfect, if he may “know Christ”; not
merely the facts of his sufferings, death, and resur-
rection, which he already knew, but the power of his
resurrection and the fellowship of his sufferings and
the likeness of his death. If these same processes take
place in him — and of course he thinks of himself as
a type of every man — they will constitute in him
the ideal for which he is apprehended. He will then
be “in Christ.:?2

The Christian idea of God is adjusted to two foci,
His transcendence and His immanence, and it fails
in reality and power wherever either of these is
feeble. Paul carries on this thought and points out
as a corollary of this spiritual ellipse the transcend-
ence of Christ and his immanence in the soul; for
in saying that Paul had little interest in Jesus as
a historic being but that “Christ” was to him the
expression of the divine side of humanity and of the
human side of God, I am by no means implying that
he was not also to Paul a real person of history.

COL ates ? Phil., iii, 10-13.

CONCEPTIONS OF JESUS 243

Passages occur in which the word “Christ” has a
direct reference to events in Jesus’ life. Now one
and now another of the great conceptions which go
to make up his idea of Christ is prominent and gives
accent to the special thought in hand. Christ is made
of the seed of David and is also the shining image
of God.* Now it is that Jesus who was the complete
embodiment of God under human conditions; now
it is the spiritual processes in himself, in every man,
which produce and constitute the lofty ideal of hu-
manity; now Christ is external to the soul, the giver
of all its true life; now he is within the soul, its very
life and essence. From one to another of these great
conceptions his expression hurries, as it is now this,
now that aspect that he has mainly in view, though
he never quite forgets any one of them. They tangle
his thought into inextricable sentences. They reveal
to us conceptions which are widely illuminative,
those ordinary-seeming phrases — “in Christ,” “to
whom coming,” “Christ in you” — conceptions as
to the inclusiveness of personality. The mystery of
the mingling of human and divine in the soul and
in the race so overcomes him that he bursts out into
poetry and a torrent of prepositions: “For of him
and through him and to him are all things, to whom
be glory forever. Amen.” ?

When we turn to the Johannine conception of
Christ, the date of the Fourth Gospel becomes of

¥ Col., i, 15. 2 Rom., xi, 36.

244 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

interest. It is not, however, necessary for us to at-
tempt to fix this exactly, for what we desire to
consider is not the genuineness of the Gospel, but
the authenticity of its conception of Christ and the
relation of this to the Synoptic and Pauline concep-
tions. It is enough for this purpose to have permis-
sion from scholars to place the date of the Gospel
a half-century at least after the last of the Pauline
Epistles. During this time the Church had been
obeying the prophet’s injunction to lengthen its
cords and strengthen its stakes, and consequently,
as the prophet had foretold, it was inheriting the
Gentiles. Especially had it strengthened its hold on
Asia Minor. The churches which Paul had founded
there in his journeyings had been keeping alive the
light of his gospel, so that a quarter or a half-
century after their foundation a writer could speak
of them as seven golden candlesticks, which were the
dwelling-place of Christ.‘ It is a tradition which has
strong evidence for its genuineness that the apostle
John lived until near the end of the century in
Ephesus, and that he was the author of the Fourth
Gospel and of the First Epistle of John. Whether
this was the case or not, it is unquestionable that
there lived in that part of the world in the last
quarter of the century a writer of spiritual insight
and imagination who had himself known Jesus, or
had been well acquainted with one who had such

© Rev., i, 12, 13,

CONCEPTIONS OF JESUS 245

intimate personal knowledge, who also was indebted
to Paul’s gospel, as he came on it in Asia Minor, but
whose view of Christ was a direct development
neither of that of Paul nor of that of the Synoptists.
We may for convenience refer to this writer as
“John,” without assuming that he was in fact the
apostle.

The Synoptic conception of Christ has already
been described as simple of thought, not analytic,
not theologic. On the other hand, the tone of the
Fourth Gospel is mature, meditative, mystical. The
life it reflects is subtle and complex. It is full of the-
ology. Its gaze is dreamy, far distant, so far that on
its horizon the line between earth and heaven is in-
distinguishable. The Synoptic Gospels are full of
brief, epigrammatic sayings of Jesus and of stories
of his illustrating the Kingdom of God. The Fourth
Gospel, with one possible exception, contains no
parable, and the discourses of Jesus in it are in-
volved in style and are occupied with setting forth
the relations of men to him and his relations to his
Father. The Synoptists represent the bread and wine
of the Last Supper as symbolic of Jesus’ body and
blood. The Fourth Gospel knows nothing of this
sacrament. The Synoptists and the Fourth Gospel
are not merely different, but are in some respects
contradictory. In the latter there is no development
in the history of Jesus’ public ministry. His Messiah-
ship is at once announced by John the Baptist,

246 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

recognized by the disciples, and exhibited to the mul-
titudes assembled at Jerusalem. On the other hand,
in the Synoptic Gospels his Messianic character is
unfolded only gradually. Those who discover it are
bidden to keep it concealed. His closest disciples are
slow to recognize it, and it is openly announced only
at the close of his career. Again, the character of
the life is different which the followers of Christ will
share through their connection with him. In the
first three Gospels it is a blessed existence in some
distant sphere in the future. The present is only
preparatory to it, for this life will pass away before
the Kingdom of Heaven will begin. In the Fourth
Gospel the reward of the followers of Christ is eter-
nal life; and this is conceived not so much as waiting
upon a future day as a matter of here and now, for
it consists in union of spirit with him. The Christ of
Luke places the resurrection and the moral assess-
ment of life far distant at the world’s end.t John
makes the Christ repudiate this view and declare
that he is himself the resurrection and the life, and
that belief in him carries life with it immediately.
Such differences and contrarieties must spring
from a difference of view in the writers. They must
have regarded Jesus differently and have had differ-
ent aims in writing. In the case of the author of the
Fourth Gospel, we cannot but suspect before we
reach the end of his book that he has a special pur-

t St. Luke, xx, 35. 2 St. John, xi, 25.

CONCEPTIONS OF JESUS 247

pose; and when we reach the last chapter but one,
we find it definitely stated: “These things are writ-
ten that ye might believe that Jesus is the Christ,
the Son of God, and that believing ye might have
life through his name.” * The author’s work then is
not a biography of Jesus, not a history of the events
of his time, but aims to demonstrate that Jesus was
the Messiah and the Son of God, and this not so
much for intellectual conviction as for spiritual edi-
fication. He alone speculates on the relation of Jesus
to the Almighty Creator. He alone sees in him the
representative in human conditions of a side of
God’s nature which forever existed. The Synoptists
exhibit Jesus as preaching the truth; the fourth
evangelist regards Jesus as being himself the Truth,
the eternal Thought and Reasonableness of God.
It is not merely the case with him, as with the others,
that following Christ’s precepts will result in a life
which exemplifies that of Jesus; but with him Jesus
is life itself, all that gives wealth, joy, and worth to
existence. Christ is not only an objective, historic
being, who once lived and died, but he is the sub-
jective principle of life within the soul. The first and
third evangelists give traditions of the birth of
Jesus, though even they ignore them afterward and
sometimes contradict them. The second evangelist
hears the beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ in
the voice of John the Baptist. But the fourth evan-

t St. John, xx, 31.

248 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

gelist could have nothing to do with traditions of
the birth of Jesus, for to him the history of Christ
went back through the ages and began in the Reel:
ning with God.

When we have apprehended how widely different
is the portrait of Jesus which is given in the Fourth
Gospel from that of the other three, we hastily turn
back and ask, “‘Is it authentic? How far does it rep-
resent the real Jesus of Nazareth, or how far is it
owing to the peculiarities of the author, whoever he
was?” The brief, pithy sentences and vital meta-
phors which the earlier Gospels ascribe to Jesus all
bear one sharp and individual stamp; but these are
widely different from the close involutions of argu-
ment of the Fourth Gospel and the intricacies of
metaphysical thought underlying them. What is
true of historic data and of style may be also true
in some respects of the underlying theology, for it
is partly conditioned by them. Was this theologic
view of Jesus a peculiarity of the author, or was
Jesus in reality the mystic being here portrayed?
This special tinge which the Fourth Gospel has
throughout — is this the artist’s coloring, or is the
portrait trustworthy?

Portrait — that is the word we must keep in mind
in considering this Gospel. It is not a photograph of
Jesus. How do a portrait and a photograph differ?
The one gives the fact of the moment and from one
point of view. Place yourself at the camera and put

CONCEPTIONS OF JESUS 249

your sitter in position, and the photograph is pre-
cisely what you see. It is the scientifically correct
record of these particular conditions; but as a com-
plete report of a man it may be gravely inaccurate.
“Fe never takes well,” we say of this or that person,
“his face has so much expression.” Where a subject
is complex the photograph, by recording only one
aspect, may convey an absolutely false impression;
but the portrait-painter endeavors to show the full,
the real man. The greatness of a Rembrandt or a
Watts portrait does not lie in the fact that it tells
us of what color the subject’s eyes were or what kind
of a coat he wore. We care little whether the artist
was historically accurate in these details or not; but
we stand in amazement at seeing a human soul
gazing at us from the canvas — a soul calm or frivo-
lous, humorous, vain, or profound. It is the man
himself that we see, not his clothes, not his appear-
ance at one time or under special circumstances, but
the composite, complete man. Before the artist can
create his likeness he must create him. The sitter
presents himself before the artist’s judgment seat,
and the artist gives sentence upon him with every
stroke of his brush: “Your character is thus and so.
You are a coward here, a hero there. Thus I strip
off all accidentals of time and circumstance, and
behold, your real self stands revealed.” It must re-
quire much confidence to have one’s portrait painted
by a great artist.

250 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

It is such a likeness of Christ that the Fourth
Gospel gives us. Mark, with his loving eye for details,
records this and that circumstance which we wel-
come as furnishing the fact-basis for our conception
of Jesus; and then comes John, and upon this back-
ground he paints so that we behold the light of the
knowledge of the glory of God beaming forth in the
face of Jesus Christ. It is a presumption in behalf of
the accuracy of his portrait, that it is not a sum-
mary of facts but the impression which Christ made
as a whole upon an artist of constructive imagina-
tion and profound spiritual insight. If we had pos-
sessed no more than the first three Gospels, we
should have had a wonderful Jesus, an example and
an inspiration; but he would have been a historic
being only; we should have had no warrant for
identifying him with the divine life of our souls,
dwelling with us and abiding in us. The Christ of
the Fourth Gospel, however, is the connecting link
between the outward and the inward, between the
historic and the spiritual. He is the representative
in bodily conditions, in terms of time and space, of
that human side which existed forever in the nature
of God. The life of Jesus was in time; but the divine
Sonship, the existence in God of a human side, was
independent of time and humanity, being eternal.
This was authentically exhibited in Jesus of Naza-
reth. Not that he is himself the Almighty; for
neither in this Gospel nor elsewhere in the New

CONCEPTIONS OF JESUS 251

Testament is it asserted as a theological proposition
that Jesus is God. The Christians of the first two
centuries considered that they might call Jesus
xopios, and let their feelings go out toward him as
toward God, without being driven to justify their
feeling by making the advance in thought regarded
as necessary by the Christians of the fourth century.
To the Christians of the apostolic age Jesus was the
authentic representative of God. If God had lived,
a man on earth, he would have done just as Jesus
did. Jesus showed thought and love and goodness as
existing forever in the bosom of the Father and con-
stituting in Him the ground of connection with hu-
manity; and, on the other hand, he showed this
same goodness and thought and love as the true
nature of men and constituting in them the ground
of union with God. He brought God down to men,
and raised men up to God; and as he is God’s rep-
resentative, so whatsoever things are true, pure,
just, lovely, these are his representatives. The soul
of the world, all the calls to noble desire, all that
makes life worth living, this is the presence of the
spirit of Christ. It is such a conception of Jesus as
this that is the characteristic gift to us of the Fourth
Gospel.

When we compare the Johannine conception of
Jesus with that of Paul we note two striking resem-
blances: the preéxistence of Christ is strongly em-
phasized by both, and the real and actual oneness

252 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

of the believer with Christ. In the Synoptists these
conceptions are lacking, though there are a few ut-
terances ascribed to Jesus which may be regarded as
germs of the thought which later developed into the
idea that the spiritual life of the believer is the life
of God in the soul." The Fourth Gospel and the
First Epistle of John undoubtedly originated in
Asia and have an Asiatic background. It seems
probable, however, that this background was not a
direct borrowing or development of Paul’s theology,
but was in part an original and parallel system of
thought and in part an indirect inheritance of Paul-
inism; for while the two systems contain, as has
been pointed out, striking resemblances, they also
contain marked differences.

For example, Paul’s chief interest is in the death
and resurrection of Jesus, and in these as securing
the redemption of the believer through his oneness
with Christ; but to John the death of Christ is not
so much a ransom from sin as a manifestation of the
love of God drawing men to Him. That escape from
under the power of sin which filled so large a part
in Paul’s thought has with John passed over into
the conviction that to know God is the highest good.
What redemption was in Paul’s system, revelation
is in John’s. For Paul, at least in his middle period of
thought, Christ’s resurrection consisted in his dying
unto the flesh and rising again in the spirit; John re-

* St. Matt., x, 205 xili, 11; xvi, 17; xix, 26, and parallel passages.

CONCEPTIONS OF JESUS 253

gards Christ’s resurrection as having been in the
flesh, for after it the prints of his wounds still remain
and he eats with his disciples. Strangely enough,
however, the resurrection of the believer is for John a
spiritual one, or rather it isnot somuch a resurrection
as the possession of eternal life here and now. Be-
lief in Christ, the knowledge of God, these constitute
life eternal and therefore carry the believer through
death. The saving power which Paul ascribed to
Jesus in his exalted post-resurrection existence only,
John gives to Jesus during his lifetime on earth; and
this is not a mere difference with regard to time,
but marks a different view as to the relation of the
Christian to his Lord. Such an insistence on the life-
giving power of the historic Jesus could hardly have
come except from one who had had personal knowl-
edge of him or had learned of him from one of his
own disciples. In spite of the victory which Paul had
gained in combating the Jewish view that religion
consisted in doing the works of the Law, there still
remained stamped on Christianity a certain legal
form; and this appears in John’s assertion that the
Christian life consists in keeping Christ’s command-
ments. This is somewhat inconsistent with his pro-
found conviction that it is the indwelling Christ who
makes life divine. Both these stages are of course
needful to the Christian; but while the former is, aS”
it were, the body of Christianity, the latter is the
very spirit and soul of it.

264 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

In both the Pauline and the Johannine concep-
tions of Christ I have pointed out a certain mystical
element — the immanence of Christ in the soul and
the dwelling of the soul in him. And we have seen
that while this is absent from the Synoptic concep-
tion in any direct form, there are utterances there
ascribed to Jesus which may be regarded as the
germs of this profound thought; but it is not upon
these only that the evidence rests for the authentic-
ity of the later conception, for the picture we gain
of Jesus Christ in the Gospel of John is in its most
important elements similar to that which we have
in the Synoptic Gospels. That he was to both John
and Paul a spiritual being renders it none the less
true that he was to them, as to the Synoptists, a
historic being; and the appearance in different minds
in widely different localities of this mystical element
in the figure of Christ makes it probable that it had
a basis in Jesus himself. The fact that John does not
hesitate to assign to Jesus human limitations and
weaknesses shows that in ascribing divinity to him
he must have had authoritative warrant in his words
or character; for otherwise he would not have ven-
tured to include in his portrait features which might
seem inconsistent with its main aim." In the frag-
ments of a lost Gospel discovered at Oxyrhynchus
in 1897 this mystical tone is found in the words

* Cf. St. John, iv, 6; v, 19, 30; vii, 1; xi, 33 ff; xli, 27, 49.

CONCEPTIONS OF JESUS eas

Jesus is said to have uttered: “‘ Jesus saith, Wherever
there are two they are not without God, and wher-
ever there is one alone, I say, I am with him. Raise
the stone, and there thou shalt find me; cleave the
wood, and there am I.” The fact that this tone is
found in localities so widely separated as Egypt and
Ephesus makes it probable that it was not invented
by post-apostolic writers, but was part of the origi-
nal tradition and had a historic basis.

Belief in God depends more upon moral than upon
intellectual grounds. It is founded upon the insist-
ence of the soul that the highest intellectual and
moral ideal shall be real. The cogency of this de-
mand will therefore be in proportion to the urgency
with which the moral pressure is felt; belief there-
fore in the authenticity of the idea of Christ as im-
manent in the soul, which underlies both the Pauline
and the Johannine conceptions, will depend largely
upon whether such an idea is demanded by one’s
spiritual nature. To some the figure which appears
in the Synoptists may be a sufficient explanation of
the person of Christ and of the way of their own
approach to God. Others, to whom it seems that
there must of necessity have been from all eter-
nity a human side in God, that this must of necessity
have become at some time embodied as completely
as is possible under human conditions, that this ideal
must stand in vital connection with the life of their

256 HERETICS, SAINTS, AND MARTYRS

own souls to-day — such will recognize in the por-
trait of Christ drawn by Paul and John with the
purpose of presenting to the soul its Master, features
intrinsically probable as those of the historic Jesus
of Nazareth and essential to the Saviour of the
world.

~

THEOLOGY LIBRARY
SCHOOL OF THEOLOGY
AT CLAREMONT
CALIFORNIA

SS 20a

BR
148
P3

@ 45262

Palmer, Frederic, 18145-1932.
Heretics, saints and martyrs, by Frederic Palmer.
bridge, Harvard university press, 1925.

vip.. 21, 3,-256 p. 20°*,

ConteNts.—The Anabaptista and their relation to civil aod r
Mberty.—Jouchim of Floris, and the everlasting Gospel.--Angel
sius, rand Der cherubinischer ;!; wandersmann.—Isaac Watts, the
writer of Puritanism..—Perpetua and Felicitas, martyrs and s
Mani and duallam.—The Synoptic, Johanuine and Pauline cone
of Jesus.

1. Church history—- Addresses, exsays, lectures. 2. Christian bio
1. Title.

Library of Congress (( ) RiK1AS.1'3 CCSC/e 3